Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan's slim, luminous novel follows an Irish coal merchant who confronts the cruelty of a convent laundry at Christmas.
Claire Keegan’s spare, powerful novella is set in a small Irish town in 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant with five daughters, makes a delivery to the local convent and glimpses the suffering of the girls confined in its laundry. As Christmas nears, Furlong must decide whether to look away, as everyone counsels, or to act on his conscience. It is a quiet story of ordinary courage.
Recommended by 2 People
Jojo Moyes
Claire Keegan's novels, while short, waste not a single word. I loved this not just because of the surgical precision of the descriptions, and the haunting, narrow focus of the story, set in a small Irish town. I loved it because it was essentially about a rarity in modern fiction: a good man.
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