Keegan is an Irish short story writer whose books have been awarded a number of prestigious prizes including this volume, short-listed for the 2022 Booker.

In it, Keegan tells the story of Bill Furlong, a hard-working husband and father of five daughters whose coal delivery business brings him to the convent in his small town where the nuns run a successful laundry business.  In the course of his deliveries, he comes across a young girl, filthy, shoeless,  and nearly dead from the cold locked in the coal storage hut.  The first time this happens, he brings the girl into the convent where she is cleaned and warmed up and given tea and a good meal.  The Mother Superior assures him that she had wandered out by accident, but he finds the same girl in the same circumstances once again when he is drawn back to the convent for no apparent reason other than his guilty conscience.  Struggling with his sense of right and wrong, he takes her back to his home, knowing that this conflict with the nuns and the town’s leaders who have countenanced this abuse is likely to have disastrous consequences for his family.

The novella’s language is quite beautiful and the action unfolds slowly and intermittently as we are treated to beautiful scenes of family life in the small village below the convent on the hill.  These Magdalen laundries where the Catholic Church and the Irish state colluded to banish and abuse young women have now been exposed and ‘apologies’ have been made, and Keegan’s novella is a powerful indictment of them in language that is gentle yet powerful.  Bill Furlong’s struggle with his own conscience in the face of certain social rejection and likely damage to his family makes for a superb fiction experience.

The web site for the Booker Prize (which this year went to a Sri Lankan author) includes brief readings from each of the books that was short-listed.  Here’s the link to the 2 minute reading from Small things Like These.  It gives a good sense of the clipped sentences, the character of Bill Furlong, and the dilemma that he will face:  https://thebookerprizes.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjwtp2bBhAGEiwAOZZTuNqtATvnf1wv5r_zJc8nWMaXh2rbGTmsSAYQwY1U382-YPIW6TgY-xoCnMYQAvD_BwE