Claire Keegan

People lost contact with him; nobody knew what to say.

Just as he was gathering speed, she jumped into the road and stopped the car. Then she climbed in and spent the rest of her life with a man who would have gone home without her.

Smells of horseradish and dill spil

The Ginger Rogers Sermon

I was made out of the last of my father’s sperm.

The last page is ripped out so Da can’t read about women’s problems.

He opens up that forbidden world of adult language and invites me in.

His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town.

Now, he lived in the town with his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters.

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these.