In 1994, folk singer Joni Mitchell wrote a song titled The Magdelene Laundries, which was included on her album Turbulent Indigo. I’m not even sure if this man, Furlong, can regard himself as a good father after this novel ends - as he may have deprived his daughters of a decent education and may lose his business, may not be able to provide for his family.

The title story paints a variation on this emotional double-blind, this time for a priest officiating at the wedding of a woman with whom he has had a passionate affair. Published to great critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, the iridescent stories in Claire Keegan's debut collection, Antarctica, have been acclaimed by The Observer to be among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English. He thought of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life. In many ways, it functions as a midpoint between Walk the Blue Fields and Small Things Like These, indicative of Keegan’s shift in mood towards a more tender, hopeful kind of fiction. They strolled down cobbled streets, past a barber’s where a man was sitting with his head back, being shaved.

About a third of the characters in ''Antarctica,'' Claire Keegan's debut collection of stories, are never named. Almost everyone, at one time or another, has dreamed of a different life for themselves, and I believe that this is why many of these stories are so relatable. Set on the Texas coast ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’ represents the only tonal misstep in the collection. As near to an epic as the collection contains, ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ is flanked by two slighter stories, ‘Dark Horses’ and ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’. She said nothing, just lay there watching the red numbers on his clock radio change until she drifted off.

But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. She pictured the plant sprawled across the floor, the length of a grown man, its pot no bigger than a small saucepan, dried roots snarling up over the pot.

Keegan seems to direct the reader towards this association, describing how Furlong read A Christmas Carol as a child; he has requested David Copperfield for Christmas this year. This isn’t to say they are always tidy endings, such as Love in the Tall Grass leaving us with the tension reaching an emotional peak in the most surprising and heartbreaking way. Evidenced by the handful of stories set in Louisiana (and one in next-door Mississippi) I can say she used her time here well.

Watch: The Magdalene Sisters, Peter Mullan’s 2002 drama about the Magdalene laundries, starring Anne-Marie Duff and Geraldine McEwan. Val Nolan’s definitive history of the John McGahern banning appeared in Irish Studies Review (2011) while his story ‘The Irish Astronaut’ was shortlisted for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Award. In her stories, there are the wide sky, the flowing river and the sea – we are often in County Wexford or County Wicklow in south-east Ireland, where Keegan grew up on a farm, the youngest of six children. The story amalgamates many of the collection’s previous archetypes—the fallen priest, the dishevelled farmer, the gossipy locals—into a single narrative, and our existing familiarity with these figures allows the tale’s supernatural aspects to be more readily accepted.

Keegan recasts the senior McGahern as The Sergeant, a belligerent Garda officer and veteran of the independence struggle. Brady, its protagonist, is a twenty-something farmhand, wallowing in self-hatred and self-denial after ‘the woman’ dispenses with his rural passive-aggressiveness. There is a certain pivot where both, I think decide to 'go for it' - take the risk, make a decision, summon up that flagging enthusiasm - I thought yes - I recognise that - if not exactly in the same sort of circumstances.

From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Chronic numbness spread through her; she imagined the blood slowing in her veins, her heart shrinking. In The Ginger Rogers Sermon, from her first, Antarctica (1999), the protagonist describes the trivial secrets they all keep from one another: “That’s the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don’t. This, her debut collection of short stories, was filled with the same beautiful prose and healthy dose of longing that weaves its way through everything I’ve read of hers thus far. Small, hopeful restorations spark against the sadness of Walk the Blue Fields, and Keegan’s occasional reminders of the good that people do serve to make her characters’ disappointments all the more emotive.Meanwhile, in what is destined to become one of the collection’s most treasured novelties, Keegan acknowledges her stylistic debt to McGahern by fictionalising an incident from his 2005 Memoir.