Book review: Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These is a book I’d heard nothing but amazing things about, a critically acclaimed novel by author Claire Keegan, which won her the Orwell prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award.

I've got so much to say about a book so small!

Set in a small Irish town in the weeks before Christmas, Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant who lives with his wife and five daughters in a small town, in the weeks coming up to Christmas. Furlong’s ordinary life is quietly unsettled by a discovery that forces him to confront the cruelty hidden behind the town's respectable façade.

Through Bill's eyes, Claire Keegan exposes the devastating consequences of silence, complicity and the abuse of power by the Catholic Church.

What makes this story so extraordinary is how much Keegan manages to say with so little. Her writing is delicate and unassuming, yet beneath its quietness lies something deeply unsettling. This is a book about the courage it takes to make the right choices, when turning a blind eye would be much easier; about the small, seemingly insignificant choices that reveal the very best of humanity.

In an interview with The Booker Prizes, Keegan explains “I’m interested in how we cope, how we carry what’s locked up in our hearts. I wasn’t deliberately setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland but I did want to answer back to the question of why so many people said and did little or nothing knowing that girls and women were incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions.”

My favourite part of this interview is Keegan herself responding to the question “What would you say this book is about?”. She answers with reference to poet Philip Larkin’s famous line “what will survive of us is love,” and comments that she’d like to think that this book has something to “answer back about this, and for better or worse perhaps prove it true.”

Short enough to read in an afternoon, but profound enough to sit with long after. Claire Keegan poignantly reminds us that sometimes the smallest acts of kindness are the ones that matter most. A little, 130 page book, with an enormous heart!

Written by, Sophie Robinson