SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE

Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and are translated into more than twenty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was chosen as a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster, after winning the Davy Byrnes Award — then the world’s richest prize for a story—was recently selected by The Times UK as one of the top 50 novels to be published in the 21st Century. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. Keegan now holds the Briena Staunton Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

“A story that reached so deep I felt the characters moving around inside me. This unforgettable novel is a literary masterpiece and Claire Keegan is one of the world’s greatest living writers.” —Simon van Booy

“Small Things Like These is a hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time. Claire Keegan’s sentences make my heart pound and my knees buckle and I will always read everything she writes.” —Lily King

“In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan creates scenes with astonishing clarity and lucidity. This is the story of what happened in Ireland, told with sympathy and emotional accuracy. From winter skies to the tiniest tick of speech to the baking of a Christmas cake, Claire Keegan makes her moments real—and then she makes them matter.” —Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician

“Small Things Like These is not just about Ireland, it’s about the world, and it asks profound questions about complicity, about the hope and difficulty of change, and the complex nature of restitution… A single one of Keegan’s grounded, powerful sentences can contain volumes of social history. Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving.” —Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

“A book that makes you excited to discover everything its author has ever written… Absolutely beautiful.” —Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

“Marvellous — exact and icy and loving all at once.”—Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall

“A true gift of a book… Reading it brings a sublime Chekhovian shock.”—Andrew O’Hagan, author of Be Near Me

1. Early in the novel, Furlong reflects on the movements of his family as they prepare for Christmas dinner. “Always it was the same … they carried mechanically on, without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and to reflect over things?” How do the events that follow echo this meditation from Furlong?

2. Furlong provides for his family what he lacked as a child. Still, they are not rich. Why do you think Claire Keegan chose this man for her protagonist? What special insight do you think Furlong has that encourages his decision to return to the coal shed?

3. Small Things Like These occurs in just a few short weeks. Why do you think Claire Keegan chose to make the narrative so compact? How does the short sprint toward Christmas add to the climax of the novel?

4. After first meeting Sarah, Furlong sits alone in his truck before going “like a hypocrite, to mass.” As her author note indicates, the Magdalene Laundries, where Sarah lives, were funded by both the Irish State and the Catholic Church. What role does religion play in this novel?

5. In many ways, Eileen balances Furlong. “You’re soft-hearted, is all. Giving away what change is in your pocket,” she says to him in bed, the night he returns from the Magdalene Laundries. Discuss her reaction to Furlong’s prolonged anxiety. Do you agree with her idea that they ought to just “soldier on?”

6. In her note on the text, Claire Keegan, acknowledges the closing, in 1996, of the last Magdalene Laundry. At the end of her note, she quotes from the Proclamation of the Irish Republic: “The Irish Republic … declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.” Why do you think she juxtaposed these two facts? What resonance does this have with us today?