This novella by Claire Keegan is a poignant glimpse into the Magdalen houses of Ireland. The writing is poetic, please spend an hour of your life experiencing this.

A moving story told well. It juxtaposed Bill's warm family life with the life of the unmarried young mothers in a convent, which he supplies with coal.

Quite disturbing if this is your first encounter with the "love" of nuns in the Magdelene Laundries, and may encourage you to research more about these places, where the love of god was shown through the wrath and hatefulness of the nuns. Even more sobering when you find out that this book is just the tip of the iceberg of what really happened in there.
It's quite a short book, a novella, but a very good read.

Recommended.

Claire Keegan has written a beautiful novella and I would highly recommend it to others. This was a sweet story about a man who is reflecting on his past as he examines his actions in the present. As Christmas approaches, he meets a young woman in unusual circumstances and can choose to protect her or walk away. This book shone a spotlight on the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. Many young unmarried women went there to have their babies and were set to work. They were treated poorly and it is only recent years that the reality of these abusive institutions is being revealed.
Claire Keegan's novella has gently pulled back the curtain on how these women were treated. I really enjoyed this story and her writing was beautiful. I will definitely look out for her future work.

The story is told by Furlong, who lives in a small town and owns a coal delivery company. It is near Christmas, busy as can be, and he finds himself working from early morning till late at night 6 days a week and wonders ...is this all there is? Married with 5 young girls, his wife seems demanding and has little compassion for others. Furlong though was brought up by a rich widow who his mother worked for. His mother got pregnant at 16 and he realizes that without the kindness and generosity of Mrs. Wilson, he and his mother would have ended up in a workhouse or convent similar to one where he delivers coal. Throughout the story there is a sharp distinction between Furlongs sensitivity to others and his wife’s. The convent plays a integral part in the story, but no spoilers!
A quick thoughtful read, it made me once again remember to appreciated the good things in life and the need to help others less fortunate.

Absolutely beautiful book about kindness. This book is a great example of how a story can be told in minimal words and pages. Loved it.

This is a beautifully written and deeply powerful novella, a very human and quiet emotional exploration of the horrifying truths, myths and beliefs surrounding the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland and how the predominantly abusive Catholic institutions turned 'fallen' women into viciously abused slaves.

Set in a small Irish town in a bitter winter in the 1980s, the main character is a coal worker Bill, the story weaves around his life, his family, the town, religion and economic challenges at that time and his upbringing.

So beautifully written and engrossing, the story highlights very quietly the power and absolute authority of the church at this time, especially in a small town / close knit community.

Small Things Like These is a very low key, quick read. It’s about Furlong, a gentle man who works hard to support his wife and daughters, and quietly does what’s right.

It touches on the Magdalen Laundries, which have recently been exposed in Ireland. It is a very moving story about the dreadful lives young, unwed mothers face. Furlong, by chance, comes across one of these girls from the ‘training school’ run by the Good Shepherd nuns. In spite of knowing that he would be facing a world of trouble, he makes a decision to make things right.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review Small Things Like These. Well done.

It is the days before Christmas in Ireland, 1985. As a coal and timber merchant, Bill Furlough is up before dawn and home after dark each day working to support his wife and daughters. He loves his family dearly. He wants his daughters to know they are loved, something he did not have when he was a child. His father unknown and his mother, a worker in Mrs. Wilson's grand home, died when he was very young.

One of his regular deliveries was to the local convent where the nuns ran a laundry and had a home for girls. It is here where the mettle of his beliefs is tested.

The story examines family, religion and morality. Are our values simply something we talk about or do they guide our everyday actions? This is a beautifully written short story in which Claire Keegan has carefully curated her words. This could have been drawn out into a bigger more complex tale, but the economy of words leaves the reader no place to hide from self interrogation.

This is a historical fiction, but the question is valid in today's volatile society. What do we owe our neighbors in a time of pandemic and racial and political divide? Will we just avert our eyes and keep walking? Keep ourselves to ourselves?

Small Things Like These makes a big impact.

This book was really good but also, short. Did you like it, world? It was very specific! I liked it.

At first I wasn't sure I was going to like this story. Late autumn turning into bitterly cold winter, small Irish town, economic downturn - the scene is not a happy one. But Christmas is coming up and this somehow puts you in the advent mood, waiting for something good to happen. I am glad I didn't give up reading.

The book really got me when the protagonist, Furlong, one night is having a chat with his wife about poor children hanging around on the streets, obviously cold and hungry. His idea of and attitude toward these kids and his fellow people is so different from those around him that it clearly shows that Furlong is not one of their kind.

To me this book is not about the Magdalene Laundries - being from another country, I had not heard of them before. It is about moral questions like: Is it OK to mind our own business and turn a blind eye to what's happening to less fortunate people around us? Should we follow our conscience even if we put the well-being and future of our family in risk?

I am grateful for Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for an Advance Reading Copy.

I really enjoyed this novella. I felt sorry for the bullying Bill Furlong received as the product of an illegitimate birth, but admired his calm acceptance of his lot. Although he had humble beginnings, he eventually built his own legitimate family life with a wife and five daughters and his own business. Claire Keegan has drawn a likeable man who faces adversity with courage, who appears to have a stillness inside him, along with the quiet of snow falling on a struggling Irish village. But then the plight of the young women forced to labour in the convent laundry disturbs the quiet of the village and the sameness of Bill’s existence. His yearning for something different doesn’t seem achievable but yet his decision to take the girl away from the convent suggests a huge shift, not only in Bill’s life, but that of the wider community. His act of kindness and protection echoes the hand that Mrs Wilson extended to him as a child, and the promise of social reform.

This is a beautiful book. It takes place in Ireland in 1946 and 1985 and tells the story of a kind, dutiful man who was born to a single mother. Bill Furlong and his mother are helped by a generous and strong-minded widow who is like a mother and grandmother to them. There are no extras for these people but they keep each other going. Bill's mother will not tell him who his father is and he suffers much humiliation and bullying as a child due to his lack of a father. The sequelae of this are the core of this book. Bill is married to a strong woman and they have five daughters. His job is supplying coal and wood for home heating to people of the little town where he lives. He is at a crisis point but keeps slogging away, taking care of everyone but himself. All of this comes to a head at Christmas time when Bill has to decide between what is the "right" thing to do according to his wife and social mores, and what in his soul he is compelled to do out of a deeper humanity. There is tremendous depth in Ms. Keegan's writing and understanding of the human heart, and I look forward very much to reading more of her work.

Wow, this novella really is a slow burn. So poignant and I’m left with so much to think about.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Small Things Like These is a superb novel from Claire Keegan, on a difficult subject; the tragic lives of young underage mothers that were sent off to the Magdalene's Laundries.
The short novel follows Furlong, an entrepreneur who distribute coal. He is content with his life (a wife and five daughters), he considers himself lucky. When he is sent to bring coal to the local asylums led by nuns, a young girl, looking filthy and distressed, asked for his help.

This book has totally gripped me. Her prose is so stylish. in a few words, the reader feels the dark winter of Ireland. I felt that this book was almost like a Christmas carol; Furlong, besides his simple life, is full of humanity. There are a lot of themes here that are so well weaved together that I can only recommend to read it .This is a book that is already a classic.

Small Things Like These is a short novella centering on the inner turmoil of Bill Furlong as he learns more about his own life and the goings-on around him in 1985 small town Ireland. Raised by a single mother in the home of a rich widow who offered to help the two of them, Bill has a lot of things in his past that he struggles to quantify and recognize. He is married and has five beautiful daughters, and he works as a coal merchant, delivering burnables to families preparing to face the long winter. It's around Christmas that Bill begins to realize that despite the fact his life has turned out to be everything he could have wanted, he still feels as though something's missing. And he can't stop thinking back to an incident up at the church the other day.

In order to understand a good portion of this novella, you need to know about the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland, horrifically run 'homes' for young unwed pregnant women. While the story focuses on Bill, the Laundry is perpetually in the background, something he doesn't notice at first but that everyone in town knows something about, on some level. The novella raises to us the question: If you could do something, would you? There's so many levels to the decisions characters make in the novel, and when you reach the end you're caught up in whether you would have carried out the same actions, and whether you think the characters should have done what they did. The novel is left open on purpose, so that we as the readers don't get the satisfaction of knowing whether the ultimate decision was the right one.

I read this in one sitting, then found myself thinking about the implications present for quite a while after. Understanding the difficulty Bill, as well as the others in town, faces throughout the novel is an ongoing thought process. And again, it's easy to think we would do the right thing in any situation, but it's much more difficult to know what is right when you're in the situation yourself.

For a story focused on women, there's not a lot of character to the women. That's my one gripe. A novella describing the lives of women as seen from a man's perspective, while engaging, made it difficult to truly understand what was going on in the minds of all of those involved. We get little snippets of the women surrounding Bill, and I would have loved seeing more of them on the page.

Thank you so much to Grove Atlantic/Grove Press and NG for the ARC!

This was a very interesting and well-written book. It is historical fiction based on the Magdalen laundries. The laundries were run by the Catholic Church. The last one was closed in 1996. The book is not in-depth and is more of a novella but brings to light these institutions that were in Ireland. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because I would have liked a longer story.

Christmas is upon us in this short story set in 1980’s Ireland featuring Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant. He and his wife and 5 daughters appear to be more well-off than most in their village. Because of this, Bill finds himself thinking of others less fortunate than he, often... usually giving pocket change or scraps of food, accepting food or wares for payment of his coal, etc. This type of thing seems to weigh heavily on his mind as we are taken on a journey of his upbringing—(adopted, if you will, by a woman who originally took his single mother in). His wife Eileen, who was not raised under such circumstances, often questions Bill and his generosity. So the reader finds themselves immersed in his thoughts of the past and what haunts him to this day... as well as accompanying him on his delivery routes. It’s here where we stumble upon the hidden cruelties of the church, making him question all he thought was right in the world. He ultimately becomes a hero/savior, be damned of the consequences.

Although a novella, I was engrossed by the end, so much so that I wanted to hear more from the writer about what happened when Bill went home. I also felt empty not knowing (good or bad) about his paternal suspicion and what he did or did not do about it. Simply for the abrupt ending, it left me with a rating of 3.5, rounding up to 4 stars. .
Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC.

4.5 Stars

True to the title, Small Things Like These is a small book that shows how small things matter the most. We aren’t talking about the small pleasures of life here. The book deals with the history of Magdalene Laundries (or the asylums). The story is fictional, but it could very well be true. In fact, I wonder how many were lucky enough to have their life turned the way it happens in the book.
If you are wondering what I’m talking about, you will first need to read about Magdalene Asylums set up in different parts of Europe and Australia. Understanding the subtle nuances of the book is not possible without knowing the dark history of the topic.
When a friend asked me to read about Magdalene Laundries, I looked up on Google and remembered that I came across this topic before. There was an episode of Miss Prynne Fisher Mysteries (in the Australian setting) that showed how the lives of the girls in these asylums were no less than a nightmare.
Coming back to the book, Small Things Like These is set in 1895 Ireland during Christmas. It shows Bill Furlong’s life in the then present-day as a successful coal merchant. The story takes us back to his childhood, artfully contrasting the miseries of the unfortunate girls forced to stay at the Magdalene laundries with no chance at the future.
The story is atmospheric, emotional, and wonderful. Not because it shows the truth of how the Catholic Church ensures silence from the crowd. But because it underplays the power to perfection. Bill’s emotions and thoughts dominate the book. His life is proof of how things could have been better.
In three scenes (two short and one medium-sized), the author brings out the mirror and places it right in the brutal asylum with huge walls and padlocked doors. There is no escape except death. And death came in abundance, but not when the girls wanted it.
To see the correct image in the mirror, you need to know what the asylum stood for. There is a note at the end of the book, but I recommend reading the history before picking up this book.
Don’t ignore this book, though. The language is beautiful, and the author’s control over her narrative is evident. She could have made this into an extended drama. But she chose not to. For me, that’s the biggest plus of the book. Though I’m a fan of happy (and proper) endings, I know this book ended at the right place. It leaves us wondering how things would go next, though we know what is likely to happen.
Overall, I would say, go read the book.
Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Atlantic Press, for the ARC.

P.S: I can’t wait to see the cover they’d design for this book.
#SmallThingsLikeThese #NetGalley

This was another surprisingly rich and poignant short work from Claire Keegan. I loved it. I loved the concern our protagonist has with spending his days getting up before light, working all day, getting home after dark to do it all over again, and wondering all along what the purpose of it all was if he wasn't doing anything good. I loved the glimpse Keegan gives us into the horrors at the heart of this short novel. Definitely one to re-read. Hopefully it will be talked about a lot in prize season.

Claire Keegan pays a glorious tribute to the thousands of tormented mothers - employed by the infamous Magdalene Laundries, also known as the Magdalene Asylums in Ireland – whose lives were nothing short of an inferno. “Small Things Like These” is an achingly emotional fictitious story that highlights in equal measure the paradoxical traits of cruelty and altruism, which unfortunately are an inevitable prerogative of mankind. The Magdalene Asylums were institutions operated by the Roman Catholic orders. Claiming to have been established to provide support and succour to "fallen women", these institutions confined a whopping 30,000 Irish women whose babies were separated by being forcibly given away for adoption. Worse, a Mother and Baby Home Commission Report revealed that in just eighteen of such institutions, nine thousand babies had lost their lives due to various reasons. In 1993, a mass grave containing 155 corpses was uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries.

Keegan’s protagonist, Bill Furlough is a hardworking devout Protestant inhabiting the quaint town of New Ross. Furlough supplies coal, turf, anthracite, slack and logs to the townspeople. A stickler for punctuality, Furlough does all the deliveries himself. Waking up at or even before the crack of dawn, Furlough painstakingly fills his truck with the logs cut up by his employees before personally depositing them at his customers’ locations. Born to a single mother, Furlough has memories of being bullied at school, called names, and once even having come home with the back of his jerkin inundated with spit. However a timely magnanimity of a widowed benefactor Mrs. Wilson and her caretaker Ned ensures not only a roof over the heads of Furlough and his mother, but also a life of self-esteem and respectability. Mrs. Wilson takes Furlough under her tutelage and complete care when his mother suddenly keels over on the cobblestones one day, in the process of wheeling a barrow of crab-apples, and dies.

Determination, resolve, and resilience see Furlough go to technical school, establish a footing for himself in life and also be the provider of a happy household comprising a wife and five fine daughters. But just before the Christmas of 1985, when Furlough drives up to the “training school” run by the Good Shepherd nuns in charge of a convent, to deliver a stack of logs, an incident shocks him to the bone and alters his life forever. Ms. Keegan sets the stage for the seismic upheaval in such an unsuspectingly innocuous manner that the reader is just blown to smithereens when Furlough comes face to face with a life altering dilemma. The training school a euphemism for a launderette is the hotbed of conjectures and surmises. “Some said that the training schoolgirls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but were girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn till night. The local nurse had told that she’s been called out to treat a fifteen year old who had varicose veins from standing so long at the wash-tubs.”

Oblivious to all of these rumours, Bill Furlough’s truck sputters and complainingly creaks its way up a hill where the training school is located. Not spotting anyone in the front of the building, Furlough hesitatingly makes his way to the back of the training house. Finding a padlocked coal house door, Furlough instinctively forces the door open. “As soon as he forced this bolt, he sensed something within but many a dog he’d found in a coal shed with no decent place to lie.” Only that in this case it was not a dog but a young woman instead. Lying on the floor in her own excrements and with the front of a gown tainted with her own breastmilk. A shocked Furlough gently guides her to her feet before handing her over to a surprisingly remorseless Mother Superior who just wants Furlough to be off her premise.

This incident shakes Furlough’s conscience and just when he is coming to grips with it, a devastating fact about his parentage rattles the very foundations of his belief. Now burdened with not just one, but two startling revelations, Furlough decides to take matters into his own hands. What he proposes might turn out to ruin not just his own life but the lives of Eileen his wife, and also his five daughters all of whom have promising futures ahead of them.

Will the Christmas of 1985 bring Bill Furlough ecstasy, or would it consign him to an existence of infernal ostracism and rebuke? Claire Keegan has delivered an absolute “one sitting” masterpiece. Even though the book can be devoured in a sitting, the aftereffects of it will continue to haunt the reader long after she has finished lopping off a thousand other books.

Incidentally, no apology was issued by the Irish Government over the Magdalen laundries until 2013, when Taoiseach Enda Kenny finally deemed it worth to do so.
(Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is published by Grove Atlantic/Grove Press and will be released on the 1st of December 2021)