Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure, Claire Keegan’s SO LATE IN THE DAY is sheer perfection in story telling.

Like Raymond Carver’s So Much Water So Close to Home, SO LATE IN THE DAY crystallises life changing situations elevating the mundane to the majestic, the typical to the profound.

Keegan’s ear for the colloquial is flawless, fluent and fluid, making ordinary people, ordinary scenes, extraordinary and indelible.

Elegant, spare and unambiguously truthful, SO LATE IN THE DAY chronicles seemingly uneventful lives opening up perspectives of tender spots and callousness turning individual experience and emotion into something unique and undeniable, haunting and highly charged.

SO LATE IN THE DAY is so deceptively slim it makes the slightest incision into the reader’s imagination and conducts an exploratory surgery of the real.

SO LATE IN THE DAY starts with a description of the weather in Dublin on a Friday in late July, a morning boasting a brazen sun under which “so much life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.”

Cathal is in an office writing rejection letters to applicants for a bursary in visual arts. He finishes them late in the day. From this innocuous setting, Keegan sets a plot in motion that is so incisively spare that it takes the reader by surprise, the realisation that a whole culture and a whole moral condition is captured.

Clear of eye, true of purpose, reality catches up with romance so late in the day, but then, as the saying goes, better late than never.

As beautifully designed and bound as it is beautifully written, SO LATE IN THE DAY is a gift worth giving – to yourself and others.

SO LATE IN THE DAY by Claire Keegan is published by Faber.