Claire Keegan’s short novel, Small Things Like These, is a fictional take on very real events in Ireland that gives those events more close, personal attention than a reader would get from journalism alone. It’s about a once-orphaned Catholic Irishman named Bill Furlong who has made a proper life for himself with a coal business he founded. He is married with five daughters of his own. Making a coal delivery one day to a local convent of nuns, the school of which his own daughters attend, he discovers that the convent also runs a home for girls born out of wedlock or who have had children of their own born illegitimately. These girls are hidden away, to work within the convent’s laundry business. No pay. Very bad conditions.
Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan’s short novel, Small Things Like These, is a fictional take on very real events in Ireland that gives those events more close, personal attention than a reader would get from journalism alone. It’s about a once-orphaned Catholic Irishman named Bill Furlong who has made a proper life for himself with a coal business he founded. He is married with five daughters of his own. Making a coal delivery one day to a local convent of nuns, the school of which his own daughters attend, he discovers that the convent also runs a home for girls born out of wedlock or who have had children of their own born illegitimately. These girls are hidden away, to work within the convent’s laundry business. No pay. Very bad conditions.