5/10/2023 0 Comments Keegan small things like these![]() ![]() ![]() There are murmurings in the town about what goes on there, misgivings quelled by the righteous thought that the girls are "of low character … doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen." Whatever the case, the signal fact is that the nuns are formidable operators with "a finger in every pie" and to go beyond furtive talk would exact a stiff penalty.Īlready uneasy about the plight of these girls, Furlong, delivering coal to the convent, finds one of them locked in the coal shed, cowering and asking where her baby is. ![]() Though Furlong has risen from being spat upon in the schoolyard to owning a modest business, he is keenly aware that it "would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything." Indeed, the fate his mother escaped is embodied in the nearby "training school" run by nuns for girls who, imprisoned, work in the convent's commercial laundry. His mother, pregnant with him at 16 while in domestic service, was unexpectedly lucky in her employer, a Protestant widow who treated her and the child with kindness and generosity. It is 1985 and Bill Furlong, 39, married father of five daughters, is a fuel merchant in New Ross, County Wexford, in Ireland. "Small Things Like These" is a short, wrenching, thoroughly brilliant novel mapping the path of one man's conscience, its torment and vacillation between two courses of action. Claire Keegan, award-winning author of two collections of short stories and a novella, now gives us her best work yet. ![]()
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