Foster by Claire Keegan

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home.

In the strangers' house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. But in a house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers how fragile her idyll is.

About the Author

Born and raised in County Wicklow, Ireland, Claire Keegan moved to New Orleans at the age of seventeen and studied English and political science at Loyola University. Later she obtained a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Wales and M. Phil at Trinity College Dublin. She has received various scholarly awards and worked as a visiting fellow at universities including Pembroke College Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Toronto.

Keegan’s short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and the Paris Review, among others, and her debut collection Antarctica came out in 1999, winning the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature the following year. Her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, followed in 2007. Keegan’s ‘long, short story’ ‘Foster’ won the 2009 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, and was subsequently published in the New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, as well as in longer form by Faber and Faber in 2010. Keegan’s 2021 novella Small Things Like These – our former Fiction Book of the Month – was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2022 and won the Orwell Prize for political Fiction the same year. The story, set in 1980s Ireland, was adapted on film starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson and Eileen Walsh in 2024.