Foster
Claire Keegan's Foster is a slim, devastating novella set during a long summer in 1981 rural Ireland, narrated by a young girl whose overwhelmed parents drive her to the home of childless distant cousins, the Kinsellas, and leave her there without explanation. The girl arrives in cast off clothes and uncertain manners, expecting the same neglect she has known at home. Instead Edna and John Kinsella feed her well, brush her hair, walk her along beaches, and quietly hold her in a kind of loving attention she has never experienced. Keegan writes in spare, beautifully measured prose, letting the reader piece together the loss the Kinsellas are carrying and the unspoken arrangement that has brought this child into their grief. The novella, expanded from a short story, became the source for the Oscar nominated film The Quiet Girl and has been embraced as a small modern Irish masterpiece about the way a few weeks of true care can rewrite a life.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In rural Ireland, a young girl is dropped off with distant relatives for the summer because her family has too many mouths to feed. The kindness she finds there is unlike anything she has known.
Foster was written by Claire Keegan and originally published as a long story in The New Yorker in 2010. It was later expanded slightly and published as a standalone book in 2010 in Ireland and 2022 internationally.
Yes. The 2022 Irish-language film The Quiet Girl, directed by Colm Bairead, is adapted from Foster. The film was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Foster is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Foster takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Foster is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Foster is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
