Small Things Like These

Small Things Like These (2021) is Irish writer Claire Keegan’s fourth work of fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Keegan’s work has been translated into over 30 languages, and her debut short story collection, Antarctica (1999), won the William Trevor Prize. Her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, won the 2007 Edge Hill Prize, and her 2010 debut novel, Foster, won the Davy Byrne Prize. Like much of her work, Small Things Like These addresses the domestic life of a County Wexford native struggling through a personal crisis. This study guide uses the 2021 Faber Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source text contains depictions of physical and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

It is December 1985 in the town of New Ross, County Wexford. The protagonist, Bill Furlong, is a coal seller who is married to Eileen, and they have five daughters. Although the Furlongs often struggle to make ends meet, he is hopeful about his intelligent daughters’ future and sends them to St. Margaret’s, the only good school for girls in town, which is run by an order of nuns.

Furlong is of a more compassionate, egalitarian bent than most New Ross residents, who are content to keep their heads down and “stay on the right side of people” (13) in positions of power, such as the wealthy and the Church. He gives money to the needy and employs the new Russian and Eastern European immigrants whom others find suspicious. This is, in part, because he feels like an outsider, as he was born to an unmarried domestic servant in conservative, small-town Ireland, where the Catholic Church runs all public institutions. However, he was given good opportunities, thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Wilson, his mother’s Protestant employer, who allowed his mother, Sarah, to continue working there and encouraged Furlong in his education, even giving him a copy of The Christmas Carol. Thus, with the encouragement of his makeshift family unit—his mother; Mrs. Wilson’s farmhand, Ned; and Mrs. Wilson—Furlong was able to go to technical school, run his own business, and support a family. Furlong feels that he was granted a lucky break, although not knowing his real father’s identity plagues him.

One day, Furlong is making a fuel delivery to the convent that is separated from his daughters’ school by only a wall. The Good Shepherd nuns who own the convent also run a so-called “training school for girls” (26), as well as a laundry service that all the town’s wealthy residents patronize. However, when Furlong arrives, he sees that the girls, some of whom are young mothers, are living in a state of punishment and squalor. When he reports this to Eileen, stating that his own mother might have ended up there if Mrs. Wilson had not intervened, Eileen insists that it is nothing to do with them and they must not meddle in the nuns’ business.

On a second visit to the convent, Furlong discovers a girl named Sarah Redmond locked in the coal shed. She asks him to see if the nuns will find her baby. Furlong is then apprehended by the Mother Superior, who makes a show of fussing over Sarah and pretending that she has a mental illness, while insisting that Furlong take tea with her. The nun intimidates Furlong by making it clear that she knows about his family and offering him a Christmas bonus as a form of hush money. Furlong leaves the convent with the money, feeling hypocritical.

News of his encounter with the Mother Superior soon spreads through the town’s rumor mill, and a local café owner, Mrs. Kehoe, warns him that the Church runs everything, including the school his daughters attend. She implies that by questioning the nuns, he is risking his daughters’ future.

As Christmas preparations get underway, Furlong cannot stop thinking about the girl or his own past. He goes to Mrs. Wilson’s old home to visit Ned, the farmhand he was so fond of growing up. A guest who answers the door reports that Ned is in the hospital and then casually comments that it is obvious that Ned and Furlong are related. Thus, the mystery of Furlong’s paternity is solved, although Ned never confessed to it. After this revelation, Furlong walks on by the river. When he reaches the convent, he rescues Sarah from the coal house and takes her with him. As he walks through town, people immediately understand where this poorly shod girl came from and give Furlong a wide margin. Approaching his front door, Furlong senses that there will be severe consequences for his actions but is foolishly optimistic enough to think everything will work out in the end.