An exquisite winter tale of courage - and its cost, set in Catholic Ireland.
Keegan’s novel is a rare encounter. Like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Small Things Like These threatens to be word-perfect, each sentence as precious as the next.
It’s almost Christmas 1985. For Coal merchant Bill furlough, it’s the busiest time of year. While making his deliveries, he encounters a young woman, naked, covered in excrement, locked up in the boiler room of a church. As Bill returns her to the convent, something doesn’t add up. In the days following, Bill struggles with his own responsibility to the young woman, reckoning with his past and the undercurrent of complicity in his small Irish town.
Small Things Like These is a book that deals in silence and as such is economic in its words, but it’s also about generosity and this, too, is present in the almost artisanal prose. A deeply affecting novel about a troubling and fascinating aspect of Ireland’s recent past.
