The setup
It's December 1985 in New Ross, a small town in County Wexford. Bill Furlong sells coal and timber, and in the weeks before Christmas he's busy: deliveries at dawn, accounts at night, five daughters at home, and a wife, Eileen, who keeps the house running and the household opinions in line. Bill was born to an unmarried mother and raised with help from the kind woman she worked for, and he has done better than anyone expected. He knows how lucky that makes him.
One of his regular deliveries is to the local convent, which runs a laundry and a training school for girls. Everyone in town knows something about the place. Nobody says much. On one early morning delivery Bill sees something he can't stop thinking about, and the rest of this short book is about what a decent, careful, ordinary man does with that knowledge in a town where the Church has a hand in nearly everything.
The laundry is a Magdalene laundry, one of the Irish institutions where women and girls were confined and made to work, in some cases for years. Keegan dedicates the book to the women and children who suffered in them. She doesn't lecture about the history. She shows you a town that has decided not to look.
What it does well
Compression. Keegan writes the way a good poet edits: nothing extra, every detail working twice. A scene of Bill's daughters writing letters to Santa tells you about money, class and his marriage in about a page. A chat with the woman who runs the local café that seems like small talk turns out to be a warning. The book is so short you can read it in an evening, and it's so precise that you will want to read it again the next morning to see how she did it.
The tension is also real, which surprised us. Not much happens in plot terms, yet by the final pages we were reading with the kind of dread usually reserved for thrillers. Keegan builds it from ordinary pressure: what the neighbors will say, which school your daughters can get into, who you owe. The town's power is never shown in one big villain. It's everywhere, in small courtesies and well-meant advice.
And Bill is a wonderful character. He's not a crusader. He's tired and kind, worried about his family and quietly haunted by his own childhood. His decency is something he has to work at, which makes his story more convincing than any speech could.
Where it wobbles
The brevity that makes the book special will frustrate some readers. Secondary characters, including Eileen, are drawn in a few strokes, and you may want more of the women inside the convent than the book gives you. That choice is deliberate (we see what Bill sees), but it does keep the people with the most at stake at a distance.
The ending is also abrupt. It stops at a moment of decision and leaves the consequences to you. We think that's the right call. Some of our friends think it's a cheat. Both camps tend to agree they haven't stopped thinking about it, which counts for something.
How it reads now
The novella was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, which put it on every front table, and the 2024 film with Cillian Murphy introduced it to a new audience. It also became one of those books people buy in multiples and hand out every December. That's the right instinct. It's a Christmas story the way A Christmas Carol is, about what you owe the people your town would rather forget.
The verdict
Small Things Like These is about as close to a perfect short novel as we've read in years. It's spare, tense and morally serious, and it asks one question so clearly that you end up asking it of yourself. Read it in one sitting, preferably on a cold night, and then pass your copy to someone who says they don't have time to read.