Set mostly in rural or coastal Ireland, these stories probably resonate most strongly with those who have first-hand experience of its recent past: the folklore, superstition, dominance of the Catholic Church and close-knit, by turns supportive and judgemental communities, where every individual’s business is known, often in several versions, scarcely before an assumed event has taken place.

Varying a good deal in length, the eight short stories have many common features: a strong sense of place, even if one has never visited it; a quirky or unclear scenario; insensitive or controlling men; unfulfilled women who sometimes summon the strength to break free; the appearance of remarkably prescient healers and fortune-tellers, while priests break their vows and doubt their faith. A drip-feed of explanations lead to the climax, often followed by an inconclusive ending which leads the reader to ponder what might happen next.

Yet reviewers differ widely in how they rate these stories. Despite the hook of its title, “A Long and Painful Death”, I found the opening story quite unengaging with its detailed descriptions of the commonplace and a main character known only as “the woman”. So it took a reader who recognised the location “on the seaward side of a winding road high over the Atlantic ocean on the western edge of the island of Achill, itself perched on the western edge of the island of Ireland” to trigger an appreciation of the descriptions. Only at the end did I grasp that this tale is all about writer’s block. Having arrived at the house of a famous dead author, the woman spends the day doing anything but produce some words, yet her writer’s mind is continuously noting her surroundings as a possible source of material and inspiration. It is not until the last page that the vital idea for a dramatic plot comes to her from an unexpected quarter.

”The Parting Gift”, is a poignant portrayal of a teenage girl who has sold her horse to buy the plane ticket to New York so as to escape from such a restrictive life, with a darker undercurrent, on the family farm, that she is unfamiliar with the security baggage scanner at the airport. It seems like a forerunner of Claire Keegan’s much-admired novels, “Foster” and “Small Things Like These”, with its clear prose, tight structure, ear for dialogue and skill in implying the complex relationships between the family members.

“Dark Horses” is perhaps the least memorable story, perhaps because at barely eight pages, it is too short to do much more than demonstrate Claire Keegan’s ear for the banter of Irish men in a pub.

At the other extreme of thirty-five pages, “Night of the Quicken Trees” was a little too fey and contrived in weaving folklore into the tale of two lonely neighbours, where the exaggeration and humour of turf-cutter Stack frying eel while his pet goat Josephine has the run of his chaotic house, take the edge off the melancholy off a women driven half-mad with grief over the loss of her child. This mixture of comedy and sadness is also evident in what some regard as the finest story. Again at about forty pages, “The Forester’s Daughter “ is long enough to have mini-chapters, to chart the course of an unwise marriage, trapping an ill-matched pair, with the plot revolving round the anthropomorphic dog Judge, which husband Deegan gives his daughter as an unintended birthday present.

These stories are quite thought-provoking if not as moving as they could be, and I shall read the initial set, “Atlantic” which established Claire Keegan as a prize-winning writer. However, her work seems to have evolved over the years, from an over-reliance on folk tales and caricatures to her admired novellas: “Foster” and “Small Things Like These”. Their subtlety stems from some striking original prose employed to create the sense of place, the authentic ring of the dialogue and insight into her more convincing characters’ thoughts and interactions.