Small Things Like These

Publication and form

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a historical-fiction novella first published in English by Faber & Faber on 21 October 2021. At roughly 128 pages, it is brief in form but expansive in moral consequence. Set in New Ross, Ireland, in 1985, during the weeks before Christmas, the book places an ordinary family and a small-town business within the reach of a powerful religious institution. Its quiet style does not lessen the force of its subject: the treatment of women and girls, the uses of authority, and the cost of looking away.

Story

Bill Furlong is a coal and timber merchant, a husband and the father of five daughters. The weeks before Christmas are his busiest time, and he spends them making deliveries around town. During an early-morning visit to the local convent, he discovers a young woman confined in a coal shed. She is in distress and asks him to help her escape. The convent has considerable influence over the town, and its authority is bound up with the livelihoods and social standing of the people who depend on it. The discovery confronts Furlong with an injustice that the community has learned to leave unspoken.

His response is shaped by memories of his own childhood. Furlong was born to an unmarried mother who worked in the household of a wealthy widow; the widow gave mother and child protection at a time when their circumstances could have left them vulnerable. That history makes the convent’s young inmate more than a distant stranger. At home, Furlong’s wife worries about the security of their family, while the town’s ties to the convent make intervention seem risky. The novella follows his inner conflict through familiar work and domestic routines, then arrives at a decisive act of assistance. Keegan leaves the larger consequences open, directing attention instead to the choice itself and to what it takes to make it.

Themes and reception

The book asks how people become complicit in cruelty without necessarily committing it themselves. Religious hypocrisy and institutional power are inseparable from the townspeople’s silence: economic dependence, social pressure and fear help preserve a system that harms vulnerable women and girls. Furlong’s past offers a counterforce. Having benefited from one person’s generosity, he has reason to understand kindness not as a pleasant sentiment but as something that can alter another person’s prospects. The title’s small acts are therefore both the ordinary gestures of care that sustain a life and the seemingly modest decisions that interrupt collective indifference.

Keegan builds the story from work, weather, household details and carefully measured dialogue. Much of its emotional pressure lies in what characters cannot comfortably say. In discussing the book, Keegan has said that she was not setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland; love is at its core. That perspective keeps the novella from becoming a simple denunciation, while its historical setting evokes the abuse and coercion associated with Ireland’s Magdalene institutions. The book’s restraint asks readers to attend closely to what is shown and what the community suppresses.

Small Things Like These won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award in 2022, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Its acclaim established it as one of Keegan’s best-known works and introduced many readers to her exacting, suggestive style. The story was adapted into a film of the same name starring Cillian Murphy, extending its reach beyond the page. Its enduring standing rests on the way a compact narrative makes a private moral decision illuminate the obligations shared by an entire community.

About the Author

Claire Keegan

Early life and education

Claire Keegan is an Irish writer best known for short stories and finely shaped novellas. She was born in 1968 in County Wicklow, Ireland, and grew up on a farm in a large family, the youngest of several children. At seventeen she went to the United States, where she studied English and political science at Loyola University in New Orleans. Her reading included American Southern writing, while her fiction remained closely attentive to Irish rural and small-town life: family ties, social class, religious authority, and the quiet pressures that govern what people feel able to say.

Keegan developed a highly deliberate approach to fiction, publishing selectively and revising with care. She is also a teacher of creative writing. Her stories are known for economical sentences, sharply observed dialogue and the charged silences between characters. Rather than explaining every motive or announcing a moral, she trusts implication and the reader’s attention to detail. Love, loneliness and unequal power recur throughout her work, often through the lives of women, children and young people whose choices are constrained by family or community.

Major works

Keegan’s first collection, Antarctica, appeared in 1999. Its stories established her as a distinctive new voice and won her the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2000. Her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, followed in 2007, developing her interest in intimacy, rural communities and difficult moral decisions. In 2009 she received the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award. Foster, a novella published in 2010, explores a child’s experience of temporary care and unexpected affection. It was later adapted as the acclaimed film The Quiet Girl, bringing the story to a much wider international audience.

Small Things Like These, published in 2021, is among Keegan’s most widely read works. Set in Ireland in 1985, it follows a coal merchant confronting the abuse and communal silence surrounding a convent. The novella won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Keegan’s later novella So Late in the Day appeared in 2023. Her fiction has also appeared in literary journals including Granta and The Paris Review. Though her bibliography is relatively small, these books have made her work accessible to readers around the world and demonstrate the consistency of her attention to implication, vulnerability and moral choice.

Reputation

Keegan is widely regarded as one of the leading contemporary Irish writers. Her reputation rests not on a large output but on the precision and emotional depth of each work. Critics have praised her ear for dialogue and her ability to make ordinary details disclose hidden histories. Her fiction is often politically alert without turning into a lecture: private relationships and individual acts reveal the reach of institutions and social conventions. The adaptations of Foster and Small Things Like These have carried that work into cinema as well as literary discussion. As of 2026, Keegan is living and continues to be celebrated for a body of fiction in which brevity, restraint and compassion work together.

StoryFlow

Bill Furlong’s Moral Awakening

Bill Furlong moves from uneasy awareness of the convent’s abuses to a decisive act of protection, accepting the risks of refusing social silence.

The Convent’s Public Respectability

The convent’s reputation for order and service conceals the forced labor, confinement, and coercion experienced by the girls inside it.

Sarah Redmond’s Search for Safety

Sarah Redmond’s confinement, separation from her infant, and effort to reach help culminate in her departure from the convent with Bill Furlong.

Knowledge Graph

Bill Furlong Eileen Furlong Sarah Redmond Mrs Wilson Ned Mother Superior Mrs Kehoe

Knowledge Graph

Storylines

1916

The Republic’s Promise

The [Proclamation of the Irish Republic (1916)](entity:event-recall-event-proclamation-of-the-iri-f586e8b9fe42) promised civil and religious liberty, equal rights, and equal opportunities, declaring that the nation’s children should be cherished equally. Its ideal of universal care stands as a distant moral measure for the abandonment and institutional confinement that the novel later reveals.

Before April 1946

Sarah’s Pregnancy

At sixteen, Sarah, [Bill Furlong](entity:character-recall-character-bill-furlong-01db5048811c)’s mother, became pregnant while working as a domestic servant. Her family rejected her, exposing the social stigma that could leave an unmarried mother and her child without shelter or support.

Before Bill’s birth

A Home at the Mansion

Rather than dismiss Sarah, [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3) allowed her to stay and continue working at [The Wilsons’ Mansion](entity:location-recall-location-72a17a347234). Her decision gave Sarah and the child a home when their own family had turned away from them.

April 1, 1946

Bill’s Birth

Bill was born in hospital and brought back to [The Wilsons’ Mansion](entity:location-recall-location-72a17a347234) with his mother. His father’s identity was never established, and people remarked that a boy born on April Fool’s Day might grow up to be a fool.

Bill’s infancy and early childhood

A Childhood in the Kitchen

Bill spent his infancy in a Moses basket in [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3)’s kitchen, then grew up among its tiled floors, serving plates, blue jugs, and black range. Mrs Wilson gave him small jobs and helped him learn to read, treating him with a care that made the house a refuge.

Bill’s early childhood

Ned’s Quiet Care

[Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7), who lived and worked at [The Wilsons’ Mansion](entity:location-recall-location-72a17a347234), helped make Bill’s childhood secure. He later recalled polishing the boy’s shoes, tying his laces, buying him his first razor, and teaching him to shave; his steady attention gave Bill a sense of belonging.

Bill’s toddler years

The Stolen Hay

During a hard winter, [Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7) secretly carried hay to feed another man’s hungry ass. He later told Bill that a frightening encounter on the lane had stopped him, and confessed that he had regretted the theft ever since.

Bill’s school years

The Missing Father

At school, Bill was jeered at for his uncertain parentage and once came home with spit covering his coat. His connection to [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3)’s household offered some protection, but he still understood that other children saw his birth as a mark against him.

One Christmas during Bill’s childhood

The Unanswered Christmas

Bill wrote to Santa asking for his father or a [farm jigsaw puzzle](entity:object-recall-object-c0ca5cbd0ad3). Instead, he received soap and a nailbrush, a hot-water bottle from [Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7), and an old copy of A [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) Carol from [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3); he hid in the cow-house to cry because neither Santa nor his father had appeared.

When Bill was twelve

Sarah’s Sudden Death

Sarah collapsed and died while wheeling a barrow of crab-apples toward the house. Doctors said that she had suffered a brain haemorrhage, leaving Bill to grow up without his mother and without ever learning who his father was.

Bill’s adolescence

Mrs Wilson’s Encouragement

[Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3) encouraged Bill to read carefully and use a dictionary, and she praised him after he won a school spelling prize. Her words made him feel, for a time, that he mattered as much as any other child.

After technical school

Bill Builds a Livelihood

After a few years at technical school, Bill began working in the coal yard and gradually worked his way up. He proved capable in business, kept his head down, and acquired the habits of diligence and restraint that would later make him wary of risking his family’s security.

During Bill’s school years

The Mushroom Line

One summer, Bill worked on a production line in a mushroom factory. When he reached the end of the line, he saw new mushrooms pushing through the compost where he had begun, and understood how the same labor would begin again each day.

After Bill began working at the coal yard

Marriage and a New Start

Bill met Eileen while she worked in an office and courted her with films and evening walks. When they became engaged, [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3) gave him money to start a business, helping him establish a life beyond his childhood dependence on her household.

By 1985

A Family of Five Daughters

Bill and Eileen made a home in [New Ross](entity:location-recall-location-new-ross-0d5303e0636d) and raised five daughters: Kathleen, Joan, Sheila, Grace, and Loretta. Bill took pride in their schooling, music, manners, and small accomplishments, and sometimes felt a private joy that they were his own.

Years after Bill’s marriage

Ned’s Confession

On a Sunday visit to [The Wilsons’ Mansion](entity:location-recall-location-72a17a347234), Bill heard [Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7) describe the hay theft and the care [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3) had shown Bill and his mother. Ned could not identify Bill’s father, though he recalled visitors from England around the time of Bill’s conception.

1985

The 1985 Hardship

As the novel’s present begins, [New Ross](entity:location-recall-location-new-ross-0d5303e0636d) is strained by unemployment, business closures, and families unable to pay their bills. Across [Ireland](entity:location-recall-location-5359e95725af), young people are emigrating, while political tensions surround the [Signing of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement](entity:event-recall-event-1985-1928065edc54) and public hopes for religious wonders remain alive.

November 1985

The November Cold

After the clocks go back, hard winds strip the trees and rain swells the [River Barrow](entity:location-recall-location-011bc66a0805). Townspeople endure the cold as best they can, while Bill’s coal and timber business becomes busier with each raw day.

November 1985

Bill’s Uneasy Generosity

Bill worries over the poverty he sees on his delivery routes, from unpaid electricity bills to children scavenging for food and fuel. When he gives money to a poor child, Eileen argues that the child’s father is responsible for the family’s hardship; Bill cannot accept that the child should bear the blame.

Early December 1985

The Lights of Christmas

The family goes into town to see the [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) lights switched on. Loretta is frightened by Santa and stays close to Bill, who reassures her but privately wonders whether she will be ready for what the world may bring.

Early December 1985

Bill’s Childhood Returns

While the family makes its [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) cake, Bill remembers the childhood Christmas when he received the hot-water bottle and the book but not the father or farm jigsaw he had asked for. He lies to Sheila about having received the jigsaw, unwilling to expose the old hurt to his daughters.

Early December 1985

The Girls’ Christmas Letters

Bill and Eileen read their daughters’ letters to Santa and decide what they can afford to buy. The ordinary family ritual makes Bill feel both grateful for his daughters and unsettled by how quickly the years pass and how little time he gives himself to reflect.

December 1985

Rumors at the Convent

Town gossip describes the [Good Shepherd Convent](entity:location-recall-location-e0021684a5de) as a laundry and training school where girls may be made to work, hidden away, or separated from their babies. The rumors are mixed with excuses and denials, while the institution continues to serve respected local households and businesses.

December 1985, before Christmas week

The Girl’s Plea

During a delivery to the convent, Bill finds girls polishing a chapel floor on their hands and knees. One girl begs him to take her to the river or let her out through the gate, saying that she has nobody and wants to drown herself.

December 1985, during the first convent visit

Bill Turns Away

Bill refuses to help the girl escape, telling her that he cannot take her anywhere. A nun arrives, and Bill leaves without challenging what he has seen, though he notices the convent’s locked doors and the broken glass along its wall.

That night

Eileen’s Warning

Bill tells Eileen about the girl and the conditions at the convent. Eileen urges him to stay out of it, arguing that the family has nothing to answer for and that keeping on in life requires ignoring some things; Bill counters that [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3) once chose not to ignore his own mother’s trouble.

The Saturday before Christmas

Kathleen’s Disappointment

While Bill is out making deliveries, Kathleen manages the coal-yard office and grows upset when Eileen tells her she must go to the dentist instead of shopping with her friends. Bill tries to comfort her, but the exchange leaves him aware of how much the family’s routines and obligations govern their days.

Early Sunday morning before Christmas

The Neighbor’s Kettle

On a freezing morning, Bill finds the yard padlock seized by frost and asks a neighbor for hot water. She gives him the kettle and offers tea; her modest hospitality briefly lets him imagine another life, then he returns to the work waiting for him.

Early Sunday morning before Christmas

The Girl in the Coal Shed

At the convent to deliver coal, Bill opens the coal shed and finds a young girl locked inside, cold, filthy, and barely able to stand. He wraps her in his coat and helps her out, realizing that she has been confined there much longer than a single night.

Early Sunday morning before Christmas

Sarah Asks for Her Baby

The girl tells Bill that the convent has taken her fourteen-week-old son and that she does not know where he is or who is feeding him. Her plea shifts the encounter from a question of confinement alone to the forced separation of a mother and her infant.

Early Sunday morning before Christmas

The Convent’s Cover Story

The [Mother Superior](entity:character-recall-character-mother-superior-2e59776144d0) welcomes Bill in and presents the girl’s confinement as a muddled mistake, suggesting that the girl cannot distinguish night from day. Under questioning, the girl is led to call it a game of hide-and-seek and agree that it was a misunderstanding.

During the same visit

The Mother Superior’s Leverage

Over tea, the [Mother Superior](entity:character-recall-character-mother-superior-2e59776144d0) asks about Bill’s daughters and hints that places at the neighboring [St Margaret’s School](entity:location-recall-location-45ed0fba90b3) are scarce. Her talk about the absence of a son and the family’s future makes clear that the convent can exert influence over the opportunities available to his girls.

During the same visit

Sarah Gives Her Name

In the convent kitchen, Bill asks the girl’s name. She says that she is called Enda there, then identifies herself as [Sarah Redmond](entity:character-recall-character-sarah-redmond-a15470abcdcc) and says her family comes from beyond Clonegal; a nun’s presence stops her from speaking further.

After the Sunday morning visit

Bill Leaves Sarah Behind

Bill gives Sarah his name and tells her she can come to the coal yard if she needs help, but he leaves her at the convent. The [Mother Superior](entity:character-recall-character-mother-superior-2e59776144d0) gives him a [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) card containing money, and he accepts it without securing Sarah’s freedom or asking what will happen to her baby.

Later that Sunday

The Gift on the Mantel

Eileen discovers a fifty-pound note in the convent’s [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) card and welcomes it as help with household expenses. Bill is troubled by the gift, rebukes Eileen when she jokes about his generosity at Mass, and remains apart from the congregation during Communion.

Later that Sunday

A Restless Christmas Day

At home, Bill watches the family decorate the tree and prepare mince pies and icing for the cake, but the busy domestic scene makes him feel trapped rather than comforted. He goes out to visit [Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7), hoping to reconnect with the person who had once cared for him.

That Sunday evening

Ned Has Left the Mansion

At [The Wilsons’ Mansion](entity:location-recall-location-72a17a347234), Bill learns that [Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7) has gone into hospital with pneumonia and is now convalescing in a home. A woman mistakes Bill for Ned’s relative because of their likeness, stirring questions about whether Ned may have been his father.

After visiting The Wilsons’ Mansion

Bill’s Shame at His Silence

Driving back, Bill understands that what torments him most is not only the girl’s confinement but his own behavior in the convent. He remembers accepting the money and leaving Sarah without asking about her child, and recognizes how easily he went on to Mass as though nothing had happened.

Christmas Eve 1985

The Christmas Eve Deliveries

Bill finishes his rounds through a town where some customers are struggling to pay and others offer food, gifts, and [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) greetings. He sees that generosity and hardship exist side by side, and wonders why he has not shared the things given to him with people who need them more.

Christmas Eve 1985, after the deliveries

Mrs Kehoe’s Caution

At Kehoe’s, [Mrs Kehoe](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-kehoe-363c304f1022) warns Bill to be careful about speaking against the convent because the nuns influence many aspects of local life, including the prospects of girls at [St Margaret’s School](entity:location-recall-location-45ed0fba90b3). Bill replies that they have only as much power as people give them, even as he understands the risks to his family.

Christmas Eve 1985, after dark

The Farm Jigsaw Search

After leaving the yard, Bill walks through town and asks at a shop for the difficult [farm jigsaw puzzle](entity:object-recall-object-c0ca5cbd0ad3) he had wanted as a boy. None is available, so he buys sweets instead, carrying the old disappointment into the [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) streets.

Christmas Eve 1985, while waiting at the barber

A Possible Family Likeness

At the barber’s, Bill sees a red-haired man and four boys who resemble one another, then studies his own reflection for signs of a likeness to [Ned](entity:character-recall-character-ned-160602ecacc7). He considers whether Ned’s steady care might have concealed a deeper connection and wonders why the closest truths can be hardest to recognize.

Christmas Eve 1985, late evening

The Shoes for Eileen

Bill collects the patent shoes he has bought especially for Eileen, remembering her admiration for them in the shop window. The present is a small act of attention within a marriage shaped by work, shared responsibility, and the practical demands of family life.

Christmas Eve 1985, before midnight

The River’s Course

Bill crosses the [River Barrow](entity:location-recall-location-011bc66a0805) and recalls the local story that the river takes three lives each year, along with his mother’s belief in the curse. He also remembers [Sarah Redmond](entity:character-recall-character-sarah-redmond-a15470abcdcc)’s earlier plea to be taken to the water, and the old man’s remark that a road will take a person wherever he wants to go.

Christmas Eve 1985, late at night

The Convent’s Walls

Bill circles the convent and sees its high walls, broken glass, and blackened windows with metal grilles. The building’s neat [Christmas](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-a573265d0167) appearance now sits against the signs of confinement, and Bill approaches the coal shed knowing he must decide whether to act.

Christmas Eve 1985, late at night

Bill Rescues Sarah

Bill opens the coal shed and calls to Sarah, who takes his coat and leans on him as they leave. He tells her she will come home with him, choosing to remove her from the convent despite the danger to his livelihood and his daughters’ place in the local social order.

Christmas Eve 1985, on the way home

The Walk Through Town

As Bill walks with Sarah through the snow, people recognize that she is a convent girl but no one offers her help or asks where she is going. A child mocks her bare feet, while other townspeople avert their eyes; their silence makes Bill’s choice more visible and more perilous.

Christmas Eve 1985, near midnight

The Manger in the Square

Sarah pauses at the town’s nativity scene and strokes snow from the donkey’s ear, calling it lovely. Bill helps her continue, seeing in the encounter a fragile moment of tenderness amid the cold and the harm she has endured.

Near the ending

Bill Chooses to Continue

Walking home with Sarah, Bill asks himself whether anyone can live without helping others and still call himself a Christian. He feels an unfamiliar joy alongside his fear, and thinks of [Mrs Wilson](entity:character-recall-character-mrs-wilson-9042944245f3)’s small acts of care that had changed the course of his own life.

The ending, Christmas Eve 1985

A Door Left Open

As Bill brings Sarah and the shoes for Eileen toward his front door, he knows trouble may be waiting inside and beyond it. He also knows that the greater burden would have been leaving Sarah behind, and hopes that his family will find a way to manage what comes next.

1996

The Last Laundry Closes

The author’s note states that [Ireland](entity:location-recall-location-5359e95725af)’s last Magdalene laundry did not close until [1996](entity:time-recall-time-1996-64d3f312c855), years after the novel’s [Christmas Eve](entity:time-recall-time-christmas-eve-4c9949af68dd). The institutions had concealed and confined women and girls, and the full scale of their forced labor was difficult to establish because records were missing or inaccessible.

2013

The Government Apology

The author’s note records that the Irish government did not issue an apology for the Magdalene laundries until [2013](entity:time-recall-time-2013-c9ceda4a44e7). The delayed apology underscores the distance between the Republic’s promised equality and the long public silence surrounding the institutions.

2014

The Tuam Findings

The author’s note describes historian Catherine Corless’s public disclosure that 796 babies died in the Tuam home between 1925 and 1961. The discovery exposed the scale of infant deaths in institutions connected to the mother-and-baby home system.

After the 2014 Tuam findings

The Commission’s Death Toll

The author’s note cites an Irish Commission of Investigation report finding that nine thousand children died in eighteen of the institutions it investigated. It connects the private suffering represented by Sarah’s separation from her baby to a history whose records and full human cost remain incomplete.