Céline Keating is an award-winning writer and author of Layla (2011 and Play for Me (2015). Her most recent novel, The Stark Beauty of Last Things (She Writes Press, 2023) was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in fiction, a finalist in the Indie Excellence award (literary fiction), a winner (bronze) of the Independent Publisher Book Awards (fiction, northeast), and winner (gold) of the National Indie Excellence Awards (fiction, northeast region). Excerpts of the novel also won two national fiction awards. Her short fiction and nonfiction articles have been published in many literary journals and magazines. For many years a resident of New York City and Montauk, NY, Céline continues to serve on the board of environmental organization Concerned Citizens of Montauk. She is the coeditor of the anthology On Montauk: A Literary Celebration. She and her husband live on the coast in Bristol, Rhode Island.

It happens without warning: At a folk-rock show at her son’s college, Lily becomes transfixed by the guitarist’s unassuming onstage presence and beautiful playing—and with his final note, something within her breaks loose.

After the concert, Lily returns to her comfortable life—an Upper West Side apartment, a job as a videographer, and a kind if distracted husband—but she can’t stop thinking about the music, or about the duo’s guitarist, JJ. Unable to resist the pull of either one, she rashly offers to make a film about the band in order to gain a place with them on tour. But when Lily dares to step out from behind her camera, she falls deep into JJ’s world—upsetting the tenuous balance between him and his bandmate, and filling a chasm of need she didn’t know she had.

Captivating and provocative, Play for Me captures the thrill and heartbreak of deciding to leave behind what you love to follow what you desire.

The Stark Beauty of Last Things is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land.

Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When a forest fire breaks out, Clancy comes under suspicion for arson, complicating his efforts to navigate competing agendas for the best uses of the land and to find the healing and home he has always longed for.

Told from multiple points of view, The Stark Beauty of Last Things explores our connection to nature—and what we stand to lose when that connection is severed.