Quiet intimacy in the Irish countryside

Claire Keegan’s quietly devastating novella reminds me of many of my favourite, long-cherished books – and I find it as captivating as many much longer books.

Although Foster’s young and neglected protagonist is not an orphan, her displaced and lonely situation makes me think of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (like Jane, she’s a first-person narrator). One warm day, the nameless girl’s brusque father takes her to live in the rural Ireland home of an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kinsella, for the summer. She is unsure of when she will return to her family’s overburdened household, where her mother is expecting yet another child.

While the girl’s newest sibling grows in her faraway mother’s womb, she slowly develops a warm relationship with the attentive couple. They share daily chores, nourishing meals and seaside walks. Keegan’s vivid and emotive descriptions of the ruggedly beautiful setting around them are reminiscent of Alistair MacLeod’s masterful depictions of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. A mysterious wordlessness lingers in Kinsella’s home; so much is left unsaid and unexplained. Even when the reserved girl eventually discovers the couple’s hidden source of grief, it is revealed from an outside source.

In clear, restrained prose, Keegan shares the interactions that build tender recognition between the three hurting characters. These moments painfully underscore what they have gone without for so long. As Mrs. Kinsella bathes the unkempt girl, she says of the woman: “Her hands are like my mother’s hands, but there is something else in them, too, something I have never felt before and have no name for.” In a later scene, the girl and Mr. Kinsella stare out at the immense, moonlit sea and he wraps his arms around her “as though [she was] his own.”

There is something almost sacred in the intimacy of love displayed in this compact and affecting book. Foster has earned a permanent place on my shelf.