Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan's Booker Prize-shortlisted novella, is set in a small Irish town in the weeks before Christmas, 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant with a wife and five daughters, has built a quiet, decent life from an uncertain start — he was born to an unmarried mother who was sheltered from disgrace by a sympathetic Protestant widow who employed her.

Delivering coal to the local convent, Furlong discovers a girl locked in the coal shed, and is confronted with the reality of what the convent's Magdalene laundry does to the young women sent there, ostensibly for their own good, by families and a church that would rather not look too closely. The convent runs the town's school his daughters attend and holds real power over local life, and everyone around Furlong — including his own wife — counsels him not to make trouble.

The novella follows Furlong's growing unease as it becomes a genuine moral crisis: whether to look away, as everyone around him has learned to do, or to act, knowing what it might cost him and his family.