Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These is Claire Keegan's 2021 novella, the Booker Prize shortlist book of 2022 and Keegan's structural masterwork in the contemporary Irish short-form literary tradition. The structural premise is Bill Furlong, a coal-and-timber merchant in 1985 New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, making a delivery to the local Magdalene laundry across the days before Christmas. The Magdalene laundries — the Catholic-Church-run institutions in which approximately 30,000 Irish women and girls were confined and forced into unpaid laundry work from the 1920s through the 1990s — were a structural moral failure of contemporary Irish society that the broader Irish literary tradition had been working through for decades when Keegan wrote this novella. Bill Furlong, while making his delivery, finds a young woman locked in the laundry coal-shed and is faced with the operational moral question of what to do.

Keegan's structural method is the patient close-third-person Furlong narration across the few days before Christmas, with the broader 1985 New Ross-and-County-Wexford material providing the structural setting that the contemporary Irish literary tradition has been working toward for half a century. The Furlong-family-and-business material across the front half of the novella (Furlong's wife Eileen, the five Furlong daughters, the broader Furlong coal-and-timber business) is rendered with the kind of patient sociological texture that the contemporary Irish literary tradition has refined across the broader catalog. The novella reads in the patient Keegan-short-form register that distinguishes her project from the broader contemporary Irish literary tradition (Sally Rooney, John Banville, the broader contemporary Irish literary ensemble); the novella's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of contemporary Irish Catholic moral-and-economic life produced the specific Magdalene-laundry institutional failure and that the broader Irish moral inheritance requires specific individual recognition-and-action across the broader present) is made through the texture of the Furlong-family chapters rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary Irish literary fiction reading, as the right Keegan entry point alongside Foster (2010), and as one of the canonical 2020s Irish literary novellas. The 2024 Tim Mielants film adaptation with Cillian Murphy extended the readership. Compare to Foster (Keegan), Normal People (Sally Rooney), Prophet Song (Paul Lynch), and contemporary Irish literary fiction. The Aidan Kelly audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.