Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
“What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”
In this tender and unforgettable tale of hope and heroism, a father confronts the truth of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene laundries, which Keegan reminds readers were ‘run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish state’.
Set at Christmas 1985 in the small town of New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, Small Things Like These follows a coal and timber merchant, Bill Furlong as he discovers a suffering girl who has been locked away in the convent’s coal house and is desperate to see her baby.
Rumours about the ‘dishonourable’ women being homed at the convent are rampant around town, but Furlong’s chance encounter opens his eyes to the horror of the conditions they are forced to endure. A gentle and sympathetic father of five, Furlong is particularly sensitive to the fragile boundary between happiness and ruin, as his mother gave birth to him out of wedlock when she was 16. So, although he now leads a simple but contented existence, Furlong cannot help but reflect on his alternative life as the illegitimate child of a young mother.
In Small Things Like These, Keegan examines the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church through the decision of one honourable man who has to decide whether to act on his findings with complicity or with grace.
Haunting yet hopeful, Small Things Like These is both a celebration of compassion and an unyielding criticism of the sins committed in the name of religion.
