Walk the Blue Fields : ‘Pure magic.’ Colm Toibin – 9780571397464

AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY’Exquisite . so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as to entirely bewitch.’ GUARDIAN’Pure magic.’ COLM TÓIBÍN’Lyrical, thoughtful, but with a thick, dark strain of melancholy running through.’ INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAYA long-haired woman moves into the priest’s house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out.

A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone.

And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.