Tenterhooks

Claire-Lise Kieffer

Rate this book

Evenings, I walk through my new city, mapping it with my feet. If I walk strategically for several hours every day, I might end up knowing its streets as intimately as someone who grew up here. I walk at the time between nightfall and the hour when curtains are shut. Tonight, I see an elderly man and his wife, sitting in identical brown armchairs, facing the window. Their intimacy is too big for talking. He reaches for the glass of water on the table between them.

An eerie discovery at a building site triggers a crisis for a garda and his family. A grieving woman comes to believe that she is being possessed by the spirit of her mother, and seeks an unusual exorcism. A brave new world is established as Galway City disappears slowly underwater. And a young woman experiences the morning after the night before in a strange, condemned midlands town.

In these stories of an Ireland both strange and achingly familiar, Claire-Lise Kieffer animates our collective past, present and future. Humorous, off-kilter, savage and surreal, she depicts the bonds that hold couples, families and communities together with a sharp, humane and deeply original slant.

GenresShort StoriesFiction

176 pages, Paperback

Published February 6, 2025