Book Review – So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan #NOVNOV24

About the Book

After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.

Format: Hardback (64 pages) Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 31st August 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I included this book on my list for Novellas in November, an annual reading event hosted jointly by Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck. To be honest, you could argue So Late in the Day is more a short story than a novella but I’m sure I’ll be forgiven.

Cathal is having a bad day. The sort of day where you close down a spreadsheet you’ve been working on without remembering to save it first. Where you go home to an empty house, drop your clothes on the floor, prepare a meal of the first thing that comes to hand in the freezer, and drink alcohol straight from the bottle. After all, there’s no-one else there to see.

Cathal starts off as a sympathetic figure but, bit by bit, as we learn more about his past, especially about his relationship with a woman called Sabine, a different view emerges. It starts with small things like him being miffed at the cost of the cherries she buys to make a tart, his annoyance at how many dishes she uses when she cooks a meal, and the fact she insists on having a takeaway delivered even though he could save four euros by going to collect it. Okay, so he’s careful with money – what’s wrong with that? But when he quibbles about the cost of something – an unnecessary cost, as far as he’s concerned – despite it having special significance, it sets alarm bells ringing.

When Sabine moves in – at his suggestion – he is annoyed at the amount of stuff she brings with her, how she moves some of his possessions to make room for her own ‘as though the house now belonged to her also’. Annoyance turns to infuriation. ‘That was part of the trouble: the fact that she would not listen, and wanted to do a good half of things her own way’. And now we’re starting to see a distinctly unpleasant side to Cathal’s character. A chilling episode from his childhood shows the roots of this attitude, how ingrained it has become in the way he views women.

Even before we learn what should have happened that day but didn’t, and the void in his life it’s left, my sympathy for him was gone.

Claire Keegan wields her pen with the precision of a surgeon. As in Small Things Like These, she manages to convey so much in so few words.

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About the Author

Claire Keegan’s stories are translated into more than thirty-five langiages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award and in 2020 was chosen by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language. It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Ambassador’s Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.