Small Things Like These

LoveReading Says

In 1985, coal merchant Bill Furlong is aware of the Magdalen laundry at the convent on the hill in New Ross, Ireland. Everyone in town knows that’s where unwed mothers are abandoned by their families and put to work. But it’s not until he makes a coal delivery to the nunnery that Bill sees for himself how brutally the girls are treated. As the son of an unwed mother, Bill is keenly aware of how lucky he was to have been allowed to stay with his mother and the family who took her in. When he witnesses what could have been his mother’s fate, he’s forced to make a decision: does he look the other way, refusing to question the almighty power of the Catholic Church, as the townsfolk do, or does he become the “other,” the nail that sticks out and gets hammered down, taking his family of five girls down with him? Keegan’s prose is so powerful that I finished this novel in one sitting and immediately began again from page one.

Guest Editor Alka Joshi

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It's 1985 in New Ross in Ireland as we are introduced to Bill Furlong and his family. 

Furlong, a coal and timber merchant had come from nothing, when pregnant out of wedlock he and his mother had been taken in by Mrs Wilson the Protestant widow on the edge of town. Now almost 40, married and with five daughters, Bill has done well. He has a good head for business, works hard and has no taste for drink. But he's consumed by his past, he longs to know more about his father, he lies awake at night worrying about the small little things, and the bigger ones. The work, the worry, what he sees every day, what he chooses to ignore, what he can't help but see.

Written in Keegan's simple style of writing, this book is a beauty. Her descriptive way of writing ensures that you can visualise every nook and cranny of the town, every character is in technicolour in spite of the gloom of the tale. Every chipper, dole queue, bingo hall, every clamour round the Rayburn, every visit to the convent, every instance of suffering.

Dedicated to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland's mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries, this is a haunting tale that I won't forget in a hurry.

Deborah Maclaren

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