So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men, Claire Keegan [A Book Review]

August 4, 2026 4 Min Read 0

This is my first experience with Claire Keegan, but I already had a hunch I’d love her work from things I’ve heard about it here and there. I was not disappointed.

This audiobook collection is of three of her previously published short stories. Each is narrated by a different voice, one being her own, but each in the lovely Irish accent that adds something quietly specific to the experience of the stories. Here are my thoughts on each:

So Late in the Day

The title work is a story about a French woman who’s come to live in the Irish countryside with the man she’s agreed to marry, told entirely through his eyes. He seems to be a responsible man simply in want of companionship, without a clear understanding of what that realistically means. The beauty of it is in the small things he takes notice of, the fixations, and the meta-experience of realizing he’s exactly the sort of man the ladies gossip about Irishmen being, at least round those parts. I thought it was lovely, lyrical, and arresting when you realize that we all have things like that, where others may be pathologizing what comes perfectly natural to us. I could probably write several essays on exploring the layers of meaning that could be derived from this story, but I will leave it at that for the purposes of this review.

The Long and Painful Death

Of the three stories, I was least sure about my ability to interpret this one. Is it about art? —its odd inspirations, the discipline required, and how we assign it arbitrary value based on what we value? Is it about shrewdness of character? A woman who has lived through life-changing decisions and, in reflection, must find peace with where she’s landed? It’s short, although it doesn’t read as if it knows so. It’s about those moments, those small instances that hold up a mirror for us, and ask us to reexamine ourselves to make sure we still believe what we think we believe. At least that’s where it took me.

Antarctica

I found this story deeply uncomfortable, starting from the premise: a married mother looking to have a casual experience of sex with someone, seemingly anyone, other than her husband. Knowing this, and the constraint of the short story format, I was filled with a feeling of foreboding from the very beginning, which it most certainly fulfilled. It was the most disturbing of the three stories, in a collection that describes itself as stories about men and women. I wonder about her decision to leave the reader with that feeling to close the collection. It felt intentional. It felt to me like religious allegory, but that may be a fairly surface interpretation.

After finishing these stories I finally took the plunge to purchase Keegan’s other publications, which have been sitting in my ‘save for later’ cart for months now. Her writing is exactly what I love. The kind that haunts you. The kind that will have something different to say from every angle you choose to interrogate it from. That’s what great literature is all about, asking us to engage more deeply with what we encounter. For me, that’s the highest hurdle to clear, and she does it in every single case here.

Note:: I received an early copy of this book from the publisher through netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Details

Title:: So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men
Author:: Claire Keegan
Genre:: Short Story Collection
Publisher:: Grove Press
Length:: 128 pages
Published:: February 22nd, 2022
The Litertarian Rating:: 5-Stars

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