![]() ![]() It’s getting close to Christmas, and Furlong and his family are caught up in the excitement and the planning, when Furlong delivers some coal to the local convent and inadvertently gets caught up in something else. Wilson, that gave him a home and an education. It was only the generosity of his mother’s employer, Mrs. He comes from “less than nothing,” the son of an unmarried teenage girl disowned by her family. ![]() But his life very easily could have gone another way. Furlong lives a stable, pleasant life as the coal and timber merchant in a small Irish town, well able to support his wife and five daughters. In spare, unadorned language, Keegan sketches the life of her protagonist, Bill Furlong, as it leads up to this dilemma. Her statement captures the timeless dilemma at the story’s heart: What do you do when you see that something is wrong, but saying that it’s wrong could cost you far too much? So says a character in Claire Keegan’s book Small Things Like These, a short book that packs a powerful punch. “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.” Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Grove Press, 2021). ![]()
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