His life changes one evening while delivering coal when he finds in a chapel a roomful of young women and girls on their hands and knees polishing the floor. What would life be like he wondered, if they were given time to think and to reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same or would they just lose the run of themselves? He courted Eileen in a ‘high school sweetheart’ way, taking her to “the cinema and for long walks along the town path in the evenings.” Told from his narrative point-of-view, Furlong is quietly facing the edge of midlife and risked mundanity.Īlways it was the same, Furlong thought always they carried on mechanically on, without pause, to the next job at hand. Furlong is a wholesome family man he lives with his wife Eileen and their five daughters. Set around the days approaching Christmas, protagonist Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, stumbles into the misery and mistreatment of women in the laundry at his local convent. Keegan’s third work offers a concise and humble reckoning of the atrocities committed against these women and children. The last laundry closed in 1996, and the staggering reality is that nine thousand children died “in just eighteen of the institutions investigated.” No apology had been issued by the Irish government or the Catholic Church, not until Taoiseach Enda Kenny did in 2013. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is a story dedicated to the victims of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries.

Review of small things like these