Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION KEEGAN | 31330009103593 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32114002662816 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Boxford Town Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32115002157400 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Burlington Public Library | F KEEGAN | 32116003845944 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | F KEEGAN | 32117002098220 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/KEEGAN | 31480011524599 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | FIC/KEEGAN | 31482002995515 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library | KEE | 32118001080656 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Essex - T.O.H.P. Burnham Free Library | F KEE | 32119000427351 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32120001350022 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Groton Public Library | FIC KEEGAN | 37003701648330 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32121000895025 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC KEEGAN | 30470001954766 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/KEEGAN C | 31479007506628 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Ipswich Public Library | FIC KEEGAN, CLAIRE | 32122003007386 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library | F KEEGAN | 39965002357944 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC KEEGAN | 31481005572537 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC KEE | 32124002047561 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC KEE | 32124002076966 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | F KEE | 32125001375713 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | FIC KEE | 31548003448348 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | KEE | 32127001301806 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC KEEGAN C | 32128004019775 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F KEEGAN | 31478010186428 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC KEEGAN, C. | 31550002607361 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32129002693520 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32129002693512 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | FIC KEE | 32130001013108 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION KEEGAN | 32132003287987 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | FIC KEEGAN | 32133002590884 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Tyngsborough Public Library | FIC/KEEGA | 32137002154492 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | F KEE | 32135001543913 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F KEEGAN | 31990005086330 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION KEEGAN, CLAIRE | 32136003512716 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." --Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
An international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Irish story writer Keegan's gorgeously textured second novella (after Foster) centers on a family man who wants to do the right thing. It's almost Christmas in a small town south of Dublin, Ireland, in 1985. Bighearted coal dealer Bill Furlong makes deliveries at all hours, buys dinner for his men, plays Santa Claus for the local children, and cares for his five daughters along with his wife, Eileen. Meanwhile, rumors circulate about the "training school" at a nearby convent, suggesting it's a front for free labor by young unwed mothers to support a laundry service, but no one wants to rock the boat. When Bill is there on a delivery, a teenage girl begs him to take her with him, and he politely makes excuses. He also notices broken glass topping the walls. Eileen tells him to "stay on the right side of people," but he feels he should do something--not just because he imagines his own daughters imprisoned there, but because he was born to a 16-year-old unwed mother who could have suffered a similar fate. Keegan beautifully conveys Bill's interior life as he returns to the house where he was raised ("Wasn't it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past... despite the upset"). It all leads to a bittersweet culmination, a sort of anti--Christmas Carol, but to Bill it's simply sweet. Readers will be touched. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
In all Claire Keegan's stories, there is a family. The protagonist changes - the father, the mother, a son or daughter. But this figure never stands very far out in front. Instead, the narrative gains its emotional resonance from the dynamics between characters. Within these families there is cruelty and violence, as well as deep springs of affection. There is much left unspoken. "You have nothing to say to your mother. If you started, you would say the wrong things and you wouldn't want it to end that way," we learn of the protagonist in The Parting Gift, from Keegan's second collection, Walk the Blue Fields (2007). In The Ginger Rogers Sermon, from her first, Antarctica (1999), the protagonist describes the trivial secrets they all keep from one another: "That's the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don't." In her stories, there are the wide sky, the flowing river and the sea - we are often in County Wexford or County Wicklow in south-east Ireland, where Keegan grew up on a farm, the youngest of six children. And this landscape tells us things the characters cannot or do not know about the stories they inhabit. In her first collection, Antarctica, "Clouds smashed into each other in the sky", anticipating the terrible encounter between a married protagonist and the stranger who will leave her tied to a bed. In Walk the Blue Fields, "A pale cloud was splitting in the April sky", as the priest of the parish prepares to minister the marriage of the only woman he has ever loved. Small Things Like These, Keegan's latest short novel, shares its properties with the very best of her stories. Plunge pool-like, the narrative implies significant depth below its close, bounded surface. The protagonist here is the father, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant with a wife and five daughters. It is Christmas 1985, in the town of New Ross, County Wexford. What makes this book distinct from Keegan's previous work is where the violence is situated in relation to the family. The stories in Antarctica swing irrevocably towards brutality. They end in suicide, in rape, in families breaking apart. The language is stinging and immediate. In Walk the Blue Fields, which won the Edge Hill prize for short stories, Keegan pushes the violence back into the margins. The awful things that disturb her characters' lives are only hinted at, having transpired some time before the present, or in the previous generation. It makes the stories more substantial and elemental than those in Antarctica, the slightest action taken by a character appearing not incidental but as if set in motion many years ago. Like those in Walk the Blue Fields, the tragedy in Foster, first published in the New Yorker in 2010 and expanded into a short novel later that year, has already happened, its shape submerged just beneath the events of the narrative. It is a sublime, emotive story, the kind you emerge from as if having been away for a very long time: unsure, at first, how to continue with your own life. In many ways, it functions as a midpoint between Walk the Blue Fields and Small Things Like These, indicative of Keegan's shift in mood towards a more tender, hopeful kind of fiction. Unlike her previous parental characters, Bill Furlong is pure of heart, at times exhibiting an almost Dickensian sentimentality. Keegan seems to direct the reader towards this association, describing how Furlong read A Christmas Carol as a child; he has requested David Copperfield for Christmas this year. Sympathetic and gentle, he watches his daughters grow with "a deep, private joy that these children were his own". Though they have little, they have enough and feel endlessly fortunate. All adversity in the novel, then, occurs at some remove. At the edge of town is a convent. Attached to it, a training school and laundry where young women live and work. There are all kinds of rumours about those in attendance - "girls of low character" or "common, unmarried girls", who were hidden away after giving birth. The terrible conditions they are forced to live under are at last confirmed when Furlong discovers a girl locked away in the convent's coal house, distressed, barely able to walk and asking to see her baby. The tension comes from whether or not Furlong will act on his findings. In her note on the text, Keegan explains that the Magdalene laundries, where an estimated 30,000 Irish women were incarcerated between the 18th and 20th centuries, were "run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish state". For Furlong and his family, "it would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything". His sensitivity to the narrow boundary between happiness and ruin is accounted for within the text. Furlong's mother bore him out of wedlock, when she was 16. She could easily have ended up in the laundry; if this was one of Keegan's earlier stories, she might have. But, in this case, Furlong and his mother were taken in by a wealthy Protestant woman living just beyond New Ross. Despite this relative lack of turbulence in Furlong's past, Keegan provides him with a complex, nuanced inner life. It is this that prevents him, ultimately, from becoming a Dickensian stock figure. Though his life is a good one, Furlong cannot help but imagine alternative existences for himself. When he visits a neighbour's house, "he stood for a moment taking in the peace of that plain room, letting a part of his mind turn loose to stray off and imagine what it might be like to live there, in that house, with her as his wife". Why, then, does Small Things Like These not feel quite as devastating, as lasting, as Keegan's previous work? Perhaps, for the first time in her writing, the lightness here has become too light - is kept too far away from the darkness that lurks at the other side of the town.
Kirkus Review
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel. As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, "What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?" But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a "training school for girls" and laundry business, disrupts Furlong's sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland's Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross' convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong's emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent's activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance. A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Christmastime is the busy season for coal merchant Bill Furlong, and this devout Irish Catholic father of five daughters knows that he is more fortunate than most in his small Irish town. Bill's success, however, was far from assured. Born to an unwed domestic-worker mother, his modest upbringing was the result of her employer's kindness. Irish writer Keegan's languid and crystalline prose is surprisingly powerful, poetically describing a Thatcher-era Dickensian village of financially struggling citizens preparing for the holiday while hinting at grim secrets just below the surface. The unspoken darkness comes to light when Bill discovers a young woman, cold and filthy, locked in a coal shed behind the convent. Keegan deftly reveals the pernicious complicity behind Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and their part in Ireland's tragic history of the abuse of young women by the church. Keegan's psychologically astute characterizations subtly convey the dual pressures of culpability and fear felt by the faithful. Bill's upbringing amplifies his conflicted nature and requires him to choose between acquiescence and conscience. A trenchant and plangent work asking at what cost does one remain silent.
Library Journal Review
The latest from multi-award-winning Irish novelist Keegan (Antarctica) indicts the social culture that enabled Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and brilliantly articulates a decent person's struggle of conscience. In the weeks before Christmas in 1985, Bill Furlong, a New Ross coal and lumber merchant, fills nonstop fuel orders and observes holiday traditions with his wife and five daughters. During a delivery to a local convent, Bill discovers a disheveled girl, barefoot and in rags, locked in a coal shed. Bill has heard stories about the convent, how it shelters unseen girls who don't attend the same school as his daughters. As the son of a single mother and an unknown father, Bill is used to stories and their power to undermine reputations earned through hard work and good deeds or to enforce silences. Despite this knowledge, or perhaps because of it, Bill makes a courageous choice on Christmas Eve that will reveal secrets kept by the people of New Ross. VERDICT Keegan's beautiful prose is quiet and precise, jewel-like in its clarity. Highly recommended.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman