Antarctica

By Claire Keegan

Book Overview

Compassionate, witty, and unsettling, Antarctica is the debut collection of one of Ireland's most exciting and versatile new talents. Claire Keegan, winner of several prestigious awards including the William Trevor Prize, writes stories that have a razor-sharp narrative style and unembellished tone, and move from the cruel, hard life of rural Ireland to the hot landscape of the southern United States.

From the title story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind-to sleep with another man--Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. In "Love in the Tall Grass," Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In "Passport Soup," Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief.

Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. Moving in its quiet intensity, the award-winning Antarctica is a rare and arresting debut.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802139019
• ISBN13: 9780802139016
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Distinguished Company

To begin with, Keegan's title story is a killer, a dark classic. She's great, like the Irish all-stars (Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin), but also some of our Americans, particularly contemporary masters like Edward P. Jones and Mary Hood, with whom she shares that that deep, rueful knowledge of place and people, and habit of telling stories that are rich as novels. Anyone who loves good short stories and/or Irish writers will appreciate Claire Keegan's Anarctica.

Deserving of recognition

This collection of stories stumbled into my notice completely by accident. I am so glad that it did. If you are a fan of the short story, pick up Keegan's book! This is writing at its very best, in my opinion, and I anxiously await her next publication.

Talented New Writer

Some very well known writers endorse the sixteen short stories that form the debut of Ms. Claire Keegan entitled, "Antarctica". There are times these enthusiastic comments are a poor indicator of what the reader will find inside. This is not the case with Ms. Keegan's work. Not every story is memorable, however most of them are, and that is enough reason to look forward to what this writer may present readers in the future.The collection's range is as diverse as the locales they unfold in. Ms. Keegan's talent is not limited to the land of her birth. She writes beautifully of Ireland, however she also writes as competently of Mississippi. Like all good writers she not only has an eye for detail and the ability to put what she sees on a page, she also has an ear for dialects that she can reproduce with equal skill.Her stories range from the terribly sad when an event has unbalanced a person, to one who has been second all her life until she takes primacy with a set of scissors, and does so without harm. There are stories of misplaced guilt, respect for the past and those that remain as representatives of it. Her stories are not sentimental; they are uncluttered, and at times uncomfortably direct.I doubt this is the last work we will see from this lady, and I look forward to reading her work again.