Foster

Foster is Claire Keegan's 2010 novella (originally published 2010 as a long short story in The New Yorker), the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize winner of 2009 and Keegan's structural masterwork before Small Things Like These (2021). The structural premise is a young unnamed Irish girl from a poor County Wicklow farming family who is sent to live for a summer with relatives she has never met in rural County Wexford. Her mother is pregnant again and her father has been forced into the structural decision to send the girl away for the summer until the new baby is born. The girl arrives at the Kinsella farm and is taken in by John and Edna Kinsella, the middle-aged couple who have suffered a recent family tragedy that the girl pieces together across the broader summer arc.

Keegan's structural method is the close-first-person young-girl narration across the entire summer arc, with the broader 1980s rural County Wexford material providing the structural setting that the contemporary Irish literary tradition has been working with for decades. The girl-and-Edna relationship across the front half of the novella is some of the strongest contemporary Irish literary prose about a specific kind of young-girl-and-foster-mother dynamic. The structural emotional masterstroke of the novella is the patient withholding of the Kinsella family tragedy across the entire arc until the final paragraphs - the girl pieces together what the Kinsellas have lost, and the broader summer-as-loss-and-substitute-family arc that the novella has been building toward across the entire ninety-two pages delivers the structural emotional payoff that the entire short form requires. The 2022 Colm Bairead film adaptation An Cailin Ciuin (The Quiet Girl) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and extended the readership significantly.

Recommended as required contemporary Irish literary fiction reading, as the right Keegan entry point alongside Small Things Like These (2021), and as one of the canonical contemporary Irish literary novellas. The 2022 Colm Bairead film adaptation is one of the strongest contemporary literary-fiction adaptations in recent memory. Compare to Small Things Like These (Keegan), Foster's Irish-language film adaptation, and contemporary Irish short-form literary fiction. The Aoife McMahon audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.