The prose couldn’t be more simple. Small Things Like These begins, “In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare.”

Claire Keegan’s novella is set in the Irish town of New Ross in 1985. It follows the daily life of Bill Furlong, the owner of a small coal and timber business. Bill delivers the wood and anthracite himself, but employs a small team to prepare his deliveries. He’s a thoughtful employer, a proud father to five daughters and a kind man. 

One day, Bill stops to give the coins in his pocket to a small boy he sees foraging for sticks, the son of a local drunk named Mick Sinnott. When he tells his wife about it in bed that night, she pushes back on his charity. 

“‘You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?’

“‘Tis not the child’s doing, surely.’”

“‘Sinnott was stotious^[1] in the phone box on Tuesday.’

“‘The poor man,’ Furlong said, ‘whatever ails him.’

“‘Drink is what ails him. If he’d any regard for his children, he’d not be going around like that. He’d pull himself out of it.’

“‘Maybe the man isn’t able.’

“‘I suppose.’ She reached over and sighed, turned out the light. ‘Always there’s one who has to pull the short straw.’”

In this accretion of detail and dialogue, Keegan introduces a good man whose practical wife frets about what he’ll do next. Bill isn’t saintly. He’s a bit lost, bullied when young, the child of a single mother. He doesn’t know who his father is or was, but he was brought up with an unusual degree of protection.

His mother was a servant in the house of a local woman of means, a Protestant widow who didn’t fire the girl when she got pregnant. Instead, she allowed Bill’s mother to raise him in the back rooms of the big house, and let them into the drawing room at Christmas. There were elements of pettiness in Bill’s upbringing, but the widow gave him several thousand pounds to buy the coal and timber business after he’d proved himself a hard worker.   

Creating a character we care about deeply in just a few pages is in itself a great accomplishment. But the novella is about more than one man. Keegan doesn’t name it until her end note, but the story revolves around one of Ireland’s great scandals, the Magdalen laundries. Like many in Ireland, Bill doesn’t know what’s going on in the laundries and refuses to believe the rumours. 

At least until he has to.

For almost 100 years, unmarried pregnant girls and women cast out by poor families were forced to labour in the laundries of Catholic convents throughout Ireland. These were business ventures. They took in the dirty linen of better-off people and returned it spotless. 

“Most of the records from the Magdalen laundries were destroyed, lost, or made inaccessible,” Keegan writes in her end note. “It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted out from the mother-and-baby homes… [In 2021], the Mother and Baby Home Commission report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions investigated. In 2014, the historian Catherine Corless made public her shocking discovery that 796 babies died between 1925 and 1961 in the Tuam House, in County Galway.”

Canadian friends might be thinking about Indigenous children kidnapped into residential schools, run over many decades by several religious denominations. The Canadian government issued a formal apology in 2008 for its role in the debacle. The Irish government apologized for its part in running the Magdalen laundries in 2013. 

Small Things Like These is a book of 116 pages and roughly 30,000 words. I picked it up not because of its many accolades^[2] but because my local writers’ group recently read Keegan’s short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields,^[3]which was published in 2008. 

Several of us get together once a month to talk about a book of stories. In a local pub (Irish, actually), we take one story apart to study the author’s technique. I loved many of the stories in Keegan’s collection, and as I began my novella project,^[4] Small Things Like These was an obvious choice. I read it twice, as I do the stories: once as a reader urged on by the narrative, the second time to see how she did it.

On first reading, I was carried along as Bill Furlong dutifully completed one small task after another. His life felt both different and familiar, with Keegan choosing details that cross borders. One day, as they head toward Christmas, Bill helps his wife prepare the pudding while their daughters write their annual letters to Santa. 

“Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried on mechanically without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things?”

Bill’s problem is that he does think, and sees things he can’t forget. A Catholic convent dominates the town, and when looking up at it one December day, he remembers the time he’d ventured into the grounds when he thought no one was around, hoping to pick a ripe pear. Looking into the chapel, he’d been shocked to see shoeless, poorly-dressed girls on their hands and knees polishing the floor. One girl got up and asked him to help her, to take her to the river. 

“‘It’s not up to me, girl. I can’t take you anywhere,’ Furlong said, showing her his open, empty hands.

“‘Take me home with you, then. I’ll work til I drop for ya, sir.’

“‘Haven’t I five girls and a wife at home.’

“‘Well, I’ve nobody—and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?’”

We’ve already learned the convent school is the only place in town where girls like Bill’s daughters can get a decent education. He retreats, troubled, but unwilling to offend the nuns. 

Yet Bill faces a similar dilemma in late December when he opens the convent’s coal shed to make a delivery and finds a shivering girl inside, crouched in her own excrement. 

This time, he can’t help wrapping the girl in his coat and taking her to the convent door, asking to see the Mother Superior. In a masterfully-written scene, the Mother makes sure the girl tells Bill she wasn’t being punished. Instead, she was locked in the shed during a game of hide-and-seek gone wrong. He doesn’t believe it; no one would. But Bill takes the Christmas money the nun offers and leaves, feeling torn. After all, his mother could have ended up in a coal shed if the widow hadn’t kept her on. Yet only when he discovers an abused girl at the convent for the third time does Bill act, despite the consequences he knows his family will face.

Of course it’s the third time, since this is a fable, a Christmas fable, and things always happen in threes. 

Keegan sets up her story by making Bill Furlong the son of a single mother whose father is unknown—not until that Christmas Eve, when he finds that his father has been there all along, watching over him. The story might sound familiar, but the Christian mythology is understated and never preachy.

Keegan threads in mystical touches to elevate her story beyond the quotidian. We learn that a curse was put on the town by monks whom townspeople forced to abandon their abbey. It’s said that three people will drown in the river every year, and Bill’s mother counts them out while milking the cow. The words “small things” are repeated with variations throughout, as if Keegan is writing music. “But these things were small.” “Small things that needed to be done.” 

There’s also the time Bill gets lost and comes across a strange old man who’s busy slashing thistles, a billy goat beside him. The man tells Bill the road he has blundered onto will take him wherever he wants to go. This isn’t helpful, but the thought shimmers.

Writers: if you want to write a modern fable, create a mythic backstory for your protagonist but keep it well in the background; edit the details until they’re both particular and universal, and make the protagonist not quite like us, but more like a person we want to be.

For everyone: Small Things like These is a beautiful story. Chiselled. Give it a read.^[5]  

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^[1] “Stotious” means loquaciously drunk. 

^[2] Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and won both the Orwell Prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. It was also was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club in 2024, and that same year was named by The New York Times as one of the 100 best novels of the 21^st century. (It was number 41.)

^[3] You can order Walk the Blue Fields here. One of the stories will soon be released as a film starring Emily Blunt.

^[4] I wrote about my novella project here. 

^[5] You can order Small Things Like These here. You’ll also find it in your local library, but if your library is like mine, there will be a long waiting list.