Small Things Like These

In Small Things Like These, award-winning Irish writer Claire Keegan (Foster) paints a mesmerizing and chilling portrait of one small Irish town and the dark secret it abides. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant and family man, father of five daughters. In the weeks before the Christmas of 1985, Furlong thinks all he wants is to keep his daughters healthy and at St. Margaret's, the Catholic girls' school that will ensure their future success. But when, while delivering an order of coal to the convent one morning, Furlong finds a girl suffering within an inch of her life, he must face the secret that his familiar hometown has kept for decades.

Keegan's lucid prose creates a clear-eyed portrait of a working-class village through crisp attention to the minutia of everyday life. Yet the story maintains a steady and engrossing pace, capturing the gradual and relentless rhythms of the town. Furlong anchors the text like a steady heartbeat, oscillating between doubt and justification, sympathy and fear in the most recognizable of ways. His tender-footed heroism resides amidst a community frozen in its own fear and shame, and it is this sense of well-meaning people, all stagnated by their own guilt, that gives the book its nightmarish qualities. The uncanny contrast between the setting's tight-knit community and the inhumanity Furlong encounters at the convent creates an increasingly surreal atmosphere defined by a sense of dis-ease. Ultimately, Small Things Like These reminds readers of the base truth that is hard to face: that everyday evil, like salvation, is still possible. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

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