Claire Keegan (Claire Keegan | Author | Books, Video, Quotes, Articles | Faber) is an Irish writer known for her short stories, which have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta and The Paris Review. Two of her novellas have been brought to the screen.
This novella is set in the small Irish town of New Ross, County Wexford during the weeks leading up to Christmas 1985. ‘Small Things Like These‘ follows the experience of Bill Furlong as a hardworking coal and timber merchant, a devoted father to five daughters, and a respected member of his community.
While making a delivery to the local convent, Bill discovers a young woman named Sarah locked in a freezing coal shed. She is a victim of the Magdalene Laundries – church-run institutions where ‘fallen women’ were forced into unpaid labour. Bill is haunted by the encounter. He was himself born to an unmarried teenager but was saved from a similar fate by the kindness of his mother’s employer, Mrs. Wilson.
The events are told through an interior monologue of Bill Furlong, with hardly any dialogue. The threatening, pervasive power of the Roman Catholic Church lurks throughout. The reader is not told much about activities within the Magdalene laundry. The discovery of a young woman locked in a coal shed on a freezing night stands as a token for a world of abuse and cruelty. Our imaginations fill in the rest.
This is a quiet but powerful novella about moral courage and the horror of complicit silence.
The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland, operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin, closed on October 25, 1996. This marked the end of over two centuries of the institutions, which were run by The Roman Catholic Church, state-supported, and housed women in forced labour conditions (About the Magdalene Laundries – Justice for Magdalenes Research)
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION AND THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE AND THE IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE DALKEY LITERARY AWARDS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022
Check if this highly praised novella is in stock at your local library by consulting the online catalogue here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
128 pages in Faber & Faber
First published 2021
ISBN-13 : 978-0571368686
Claire Keegan