Foster

Foster by Claire Keegan

Fiction

2022 Grove Press (first published in 2010)

Finished on January 17, 2023

Rating: 5/5 (Outstanding)

Publisher's Blurb:

An international bestseller and one of The Times' "Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century," Claire Keegan's piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US.

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household--where everything is so well tended to--and this summer must soon come to an end.

Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Prize and first published in the New Yorker, Claire Keegan's Foster has sold over 120,000 copies in the UK and Ireland, where it is also required reading in schools. A story of astonishing emotional depth now expanded and newly revised in a standalone edition, Foster showcases Claire Keegan's great talent and cements her reputation as one of our most important and prodigious storytellers.

Typically, I don't care for short stories, preferring to immerse myself in a novel and become fully acquainted with the cast of characters. However, Claire Keegan's brilliant novella pulled me in from the opening lines and I didn't stop reading until the final page, at which I flipped back to the beginning and re-read the first chapter. Keegan's spare prose and tender relationships bring to mind Kent Haruf's beloved Plainsong; I can see how Foster garnered tremendous popularity in 2022. 

Foster is deeply moving and a treasure of a book. I can hardly wait to get a copy of Small Things Like These, which has been equally popular among readers. Thank you, Ann Patchett, for bringing Keegan's books to my attention on Parnassus' Friday stories ("If You Haven't Read These Books, They're New to You") on Instagram. My to-be-read list keeps growing thanks to these recommendations!

“She is able to tell a story in a paragraph, or to compress a novel into a few thousand words,” said Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, which published an abridged version of “Foster” in 2010. “There’s such a precision to what she notices.”