Finished in one sitting, which I have not done in years

Finished. One sitting, a Sunday afternoon in November, which I have not managed since I was about thirty.

It is short. I know that's the first thing anyone says about it and I would rather lead with something else, but the shortness is load-bearing. Keegan gives you a coal merchant's week in a small Irish town at Christmas and does not spend a single sentence on anything that isn't working.

What she does, and I've been trying for a fortnight to describe it accurately: she gives you a man who is entirely ordinary, in specific detail — the yard, the accounts, the state of his hands, the five daughters, the wife who wants him to keep his head down — and she lets you sit inside that ordinariness long enough that when a decision arrives you feel exactly what it will cost him. There's no speech. Nobody explains the moral position out loud. What the town won't say out loud does all the work, and it goes unsaid in shops.

I read the scene in the coal shed twice, straight through, immediately, which I never do. Then I put the book down and went and stood in the kitchen for a while.

Specifics I want on record. The prose is plain and very tightly controlled; there are perhaps four sentences in the whole thing that call attention to themselves and each one has earned the attention. The mother-and-son material in the opening pages sets up everything that follows and you don't notice it doing so until much later. And it stops precisely where it should, at the point of highest cost and lowest resolution, which will infuriate readers who want to know what happened afterwards. I wanted to know what happened afterwards. That is a separate complaint from the book being wrong.

One reservation, and it is genuinely small: the wife is thinner than she needs to be. She exists largely to voice the sensible frightened position, and I would have liked a page from inside her. Keegan can obviously do it. She chose not to.

I should admit I came to this expecting to bounce straight off. Everyone had told me it was beautiful, and I have a bad reaction to being told a book is beautiful; in my experience it means nothing happens in it. Something happens in this one.

The edition I read is the small hardback with the deckled edge; it costs more than it ought to and I have stopped minding, because it fits in a coat pocket, which I doubt is an accident.

I have since bought three copies for other people, which isn't like me at all, and one of those has already been handed on again.

Nine. Not ten, only because I want somewhere left to go with her.

Read alongside: Foster, which is doing something related and smaller.