Small Things Like These

Bill Furlong, a coal merchant raised by the kindness of near-strangers, makes his rounds until a delivery to the convent brings him face to face with the town's open secret: the girls confined and exploited in its laundry. Keegan writes with the compression of a poet, trusting silences and small gestures to carry moral weight, and the drama turns not on spectacle but on a single question of conscience.

Around Furlong she evokes a whole community's complicity, the averted eyes and prudent silences by which ordinary people permit cruelty to continue. At barely a hundred pages it can be read in an evening, yet it lingers far longer, its restraint amplifying rather than muting its force.