Tenterhooks by Claire-Lise Kieffer
176 pages
Paperback
6 February 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7393979-6-8
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.
About the Author
Claire-Lise Kieffer is Franco-German and lives in Galway. Her fiction has appeared in the literary journals Banshee, Profiles, Crossways and The Honest Ulsterman, among others. She was a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award in 2022 and 2024 and is working on a novel.
Author photo by Cal de Bri
Media
22 of the best book covers of the month | Print | 28 November 2024
Praise for Tenterhooks
“Beautifully crafted and so contemporary. With a fine eye and fluent prose, Kieffer’s imaginative stories sharpen our vision of the world around us. She is a real and original talent.”
“Kieffer’s stories are propulsive and barbed and sleekly written. Like a cracked mirror, her writing brilliantly reflects modern life and modern relationships with a shade of exquisite uncanniness.”
“Claire-Lise Kieffer brings a fresh way of seeing to everything her gaze alights upon. An absorbing collection, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. A fearless, funny, lyrical new voice.”