Tessa Hadley writes:

Keegan’s debt to McGahern is significant, and avowed; one of the stories in this collection, ‘Surrender’, is explicitly worked up from a suggestion in McGahern’s Memoir (it’s finely done, but seems too dependent on McGahern’s own version of his father). An appreciation of McGahern’s delicately cumulative realism, resisting explication or resolution, is somewhere behind the first three stories in particular, although Keegan’s vision and style are distinctively her own, inflected from the perspective of her younger generation, richly allusive and dreamy. Her best stories seem to grow, like McGahern’s, from the underside of the precise detail, up towards their shape and implication; others – in common with the stories in Antarctica, her first book – are more playful or fantastic, and tend more to overview and epigrammatic statement (‘forgiving might mean forgetting and she preferred to hold onto her bitterness,’ or ‘To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness’). ‘The Parting Gift’ and ‘Dark Horses’ both achieve, like the title story, density and intensity on the page, combining exact sensuous detail (a pint of stout settles, ‘the dark falling slowly away from the cream’) and caught fragments of social exchange with groping intimations of shapes and meaning.

(LRB 24 January 2008)

Faber | paperback 163 pp. |ISBN: 9780571233069