About the Book
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season.
As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
Format: Hardcover (128 pages) Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 21st October 2021 Genre: Literary Fiction
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My Review
I rarely re-read books but in the case of Small Things Like These as soon as I’d finished the book I turned back to the beginning and read it again, not wanting to miss any little detail I may have overlooked first time around. And there were many.
The book is set in the approach to Christmas – ‘It was a December of crows’ – traditionally a time of generosity which, although absent in others, is embodied in the person of Bill Furlong. Although they may be considered ‘small things’ by some, Bill’s acts of kindness – a lift home in the rain, a pile of logs for a loyal customer – are of great significance to the recipients.
I loved all the domestic details of family life in the Furlong household – making the Christmas cake, baking mince pies, decorating the Christmas tree and Bill’s daughters writing their letters to Santa. (One of many poignant moments for me was later in the book when Bill goes into a toyshop to ask if they have a five hundred piece jigsaw puzzle of a farm.)
At one point, Bill asks himself ‘was there any point in being alive without helping one another?’ It’s that instinct that motivates him to take the action he does at the end of the book even though it will mean going up against the power of the Church and may have unwelcome consequences for him and his family. In part, it’s a way of ‘paying forward’ the generosity of Mrs Wilson, the woman who continued to employ his unmarried mother even after she became pregnant, provided Bill with a home after his mother’s death and gave him the funds to start up his business. He recalls Mrs Wilson’s daily kindnesses ‘how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done’. Yes, those small things again.
How can any reader not fall in love with Bill, the quiet, unassuming hero of the book who epitomises the generosity of spirit preached in the Bible, a generosity which is not always demonstrated in practice by others, especially those proven to have offered only cruelty and condemnation where there should have been mercy and understanding.
I loved the gentle lilt of Claire Keegan’s writing and the sense that every single word has been carefully chosen – which it probably has. The opening paragraph of the book is a good example. ‘In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.’
Small Things Like These is a quietly powerful novel, an exquisite little gem of a book. It’s no surprise that so many readers have fallen in love with it.
In three words: Eloquent, tender, sublime
Try something similar: Stoner by John Williams
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About the Author
Irish writer Claire Keegan’s debut collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The Observer called these stories: ‘Among the finest recently written in English’. It was also awarded the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. In 2007, her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to huge critical acclaim and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles. The prize was adjudicated by Hilary Mantel. Foster (2010) won The Davy Byrnes Award, then the world’s richest prize for a story. It judged by Richard Ford: “Keegan is a rarity-someone I will always want to read’.”
Keegan’s stories are published in English by Faber & Faber, have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Best American Stories, won numerous awards – and are translated into 17 languages. She is internationally renowned as a teacher of creative writing. (Photo/bio: Author website)
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