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What it argues
Small Things Like These is a novella set in the Irish town of New Ross in 1985. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant, a father of five daughters, a man of routine and quiet industry. In the weeks before Christmas, making deliveries to the local convent, he discovers something in the coal shed that he cannot unhear and cannot un-see: evidence of what the Magdalene laundries were — and of what the whole town, in some form, already knows. The novella follows his reckoning with what to do.
Keegan is not writing an exposé. She assumes you know, roughly, what the Magdalene laundries were — institutions run by the Catholic Church in Ireland where women deemed immoral were imprisoned and put to work, often for years, with the cooperation of families, communities, and the state. The subject of the novella is not the institutions themselves but the ordinary moral geography of complicity: how a decent man in a small town can know and not-know simultaneously, and what it costs to move from not-knowing to knowing to acting.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Magdalene laundries persisted for generations because ordinary people — neighbors, tradespeople, town councils — chose the comfort of not-knowing over the discomfort of knowing.
- 2.
Bill Furlong is not a heroic figure; he is a man with a family and a livelihood who makes a choice at significant personal cost. Keegan refuses to make it easy.
- 3.
The novella's brevity is a formal argument: complicity and its undoing can be contained in small decisions, not just in grand narratives of institutional failure.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Claire Keegan is an Irish writer whose short fiction is widely regarded as some of the finest in contemporary literature. Her earlier collection Antarctica and the novella Foster — about a child sent to live with relatives in rural Ireland — established her as a master of compression and implication. Small Things Like These, published in 2021, became an international bestseller and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It was adapted as a 2022 film starring Cillian Murphy. Keegan lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.
