Walk the blue fields - Claire Keegan

A 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. A Harvard student flies south to celebrate his birthday at his step-father's condominium by the sea. While the scent of hay drifts up from neighbouring fields, a teenage immigrant articulates the reason for her going. 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, and it is against this landscape that the stories of Walk the Blue Fields so beautifully articulate all the yearnings of the human heart.