Small Things Like These

Genre

Literary Fiction

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Publication year

2021

ISBN

9780571368686

Set in a small Irish town in 1985, Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, in the weeks before Christmas. Delivering to the local convent, he encounters evidence of the cruelty of a Magdalene laundry and must decide how to respond. Claire Keegan's short novel...

Few recent novels do so much in so little space as Claire Keegan's spare, luminous story, set in a County Wexford town over one cold Christmas in 1985. 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. Tender, unsentimental and quietly devastating, it is a modern classic about the cost and the necessity of doing the decent thing.