Claire Keegan latest offering features three tales. In So Late in the Day, Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in The Long and Painful Death, a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in Antarctica, a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.

As always with this wonderful author, Keegan displays her mastery of the short story format. With spare prose she tells powerful, affecting stories, compact, tight, a masterclass on how to say more with less.
The only pity is there are only three of them.

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I find the last story in this collection so misogynistic that it really colours my feelings of the book. Actually all of the women in the three novellas are pretty nasty. But the final study reads like Looking for Mr.Goodbar.-a married woman wants some sex outside her marriage and she is punished for it. What a regressive story-very very unsettling. ( )

Irish short story writer Claire Keegan here shares three succinct short stories to delight readers’ imaginations. Each of them bears her eloquent style with plot twists all the way until the last sentence. This collection has three stories about the tenuous relationship between women and men.

“So Late in the Day” describes a romance as it evolves from courtship into engagement. In so doing, it comments on how the social mores in Ireland about marriage are lacking and could use substantial improvement.

“The Long and Painful Death” describes how a German professor courts a female aspiring writer, only to have his advances emerge ironically in her work of fiction.

“Antarctica,” a previously published story, tells of a short romantic fling between two new acquaintances… only one party is a married woman and the other part has something up his sleeve.

If you’re looking for quick reads packed with content and skillful writing, Keegan’s stories are for you. These stories do not convey romance at its best, but it tells an all-too-common tale about the difficulties between the genders. ( )

I will officially read anything this author writes. Unlike her other two novellas I’ve read (Foster and Small Things Like These), this collection of three short stories is a bit darker. She touches on a broken engagement, a writer staying in a remote house, and a woman set on having her first affair while Christmas shopping for her family. Each story pulls you in quickly with its descriptions and atmosphere. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next. ( )

Claire Keegan's stories are in such demand that she can publish a tiny collection of just three stories, two of them from previous collections, and have people (namely, me) eagerly buy the slim hardcover. So Late in the Day begins with the new story, in which a man goes through his day thinking back on a relationship that ended tragically, given the reactions of his co-workers as he goes about his day. What happened and why is slowly revealed in ways that show just how masterful a writer Keegan is. The next story, The Long and Painful Death, follows a woman on a writing retreat, staying in a cottage Henrich Böll had used. Just as she begins to settle in, her peace is imposed upon by a man who wants to tour the cottage and her attempts to keep to her plans for her days there are impinged upon by the man's presence. The final story, Antarctica, follows a married woman who has decided to have a brief fling in the city.

Each story involves the relationships between men and women, and whether the relationships are glancing or intimate, involve men acting as though their own desires were the only ones that mattered. These stories are far less hopeful than her previous two longer short stories published in this format, but they are every bit as assured and resonant.

I like the physical form this book takes, treating just three short stories as though they were as important as a novel, and the way they are formatted on the page, with generous margins and a title page for each story. ( )