Dua's Monthly Read for May 2026

“My monthly read for May is So Late In The Day by Irish writer Claire Keegan. Her stories are small gems: deceptively short, but they carry the heft of a great novel. This will take you less than an hour to read – but you'll want to start again the moment you finish.

“So Late In The Day opens with an unremarkable man, Cathal, on a seemingly uneventful day in Dublin, Friday 29 July. But something is off. He’s distracted at work, his colleagues are being nice to him, he’s trying to avoid them.

“We soon realise that this is not the day Cathal had planned. Small clues are dropped, the date being one of them: 29 July is the anniversary of the doomed marriage between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

“At the centre of the book is Cathal’s relationship with Sabine, his French girlfriend. With her trademark precision, Claire slowly reveals the small cuts Cathal unthinkingly delivers to their future together. He lacks a generosity of spirit. He makes mental notes about women’s weight. He kills every potentially romantic moment.

“Cathal is no monster. You won’t find him lurking in the manosphere, and that’s exactly the point. His is a more mundane form of inherited misogyny that sucks the joy out of his relationship with Sabine and ultimately diminishes him, too.

“I read So Late In The Day as a kind of parable about lazy misogyny. It’s a lesson in what you risk losing if you can’t bring yourself to change. Claire delivers this without melodrama or judgment and with endless grace. You’ll want to read this book at least twice to see how she does it.” – Dua Lipa

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