At about 16k words, this small gem is somewhere between a long short story and a novella. Not that I care as it's a great read.
One thing though - the movie is even better than the book, so if you see it going by on SBS World Movies, dive in and record it as it's totally faithful to Keegan's words, but just has that something in the way of emotion and the subtlety of the relationships - and the setting of 1980s (?) rural Ireland - that words on the page can't quite get hold of as well, of a young girl's blossoming time caught between two sets of adults.
Claire Keegan (born into a farming family in Co Wicklow in 1968) has justifiably won a heap of awards for her short story / novella writings, and at least two of them have been made into movies.
So, you could do worse than track down anything she has written, book or film, as always, there's lessons for all of us to learn from the experience.
Cheers....
T.R.E.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>