Antarctica

＂Reading Irish-born Claire Keegan is like succumbing to a drug: eerie, hallucinogenic, time-stopping.＂ --San Francisco Chronicle

A new edition of the now iconic fiction writer Claire Keegan’s debut story collection featuring a fresh cover to tie in with her current bestselling trio: the Booker Prize shortlisted Small Things Like These, Foster, and So Late in the Day

First published in 1999 to great acclaim, Antarctica introduced the world to Claire Keegan whose powerful short fiction has captured audiences internationally and established her as a writer ＂rated among the form’s most masterful practitioners＂ (New York Times). Now with a recently revised titular story, Antarctica showcases the brilliance of Keegan’s spare yet piercing storytelling, evident from the very start of her career.

In ＂Antarctica,＂ a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with a man other than her husband. ＂Love in the Tall Grass＂ takes Cordelia down a coastal road on the last day of the twentieth century to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting. ＂Stay Close to the Water’s Edge＂ tells of a young Harvard student who is pitilessly humiliated by his homophobic stepfather on his birthday. Keegan’s writing contains a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. Often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, the reader feels that something momentous is lurking within each of these carefully sculpted tales.

The winner of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, Antarctica remains a dazzling and haunting debut by one of the world’s best short story writers.

Claire Keegan’s works of fiction are internationally acclaimed and have been translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award -- the world’s richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland, 2022, and Author of the Year, 2023.