Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

In this programme we introduce Small Things Like These (2021) by Claire Keegan, an Irish author whose stories are translated into thirty languages and have won several literary prizes.

The publisher’s description of the book reads:
“It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the week leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces his busiest season. As he goes round the houses making deliveries, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church.”

At the start of the book Claire Keegan writes: “This story is dedicated to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries.”

Exceptionally, this book was praised by everyone who discussed it at our Reading Circle.

Here are the books recommended by our reading Circle members this month:

• J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Teenager Holden Caulfield, expelled from his prep school, wanders through New York City over a few days struggling to come to terms with the complexities of growing up and the seeming phoniness of the adult world. A classic.
• Daniel J. Siegel:  Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain (2013).  How the brain develops during puberty and adolescence.
• Claire Keegan: Foster (2010). A novella about a small girl who is thrown upon the kindness of strangers while her mother gives birth to yet another baby.
• Isobel Allende: The Wind Knows My Name (2023). The lives of a Jewish boy escaping Nazi-occupied Europe and a mother and daughter fleeing 21st century El Salvador intersect  – a novel about war and immigration.
• Salman Rushdie: Victory City (2023). A novel framed as a fictional translation of an epic originally written in Sanskrit. A cerebral interrogation into the meaning of history and a celebration of the power of words. Really powerful, an enthralling read.
• Irene Nemirovsky: Suite Francaise (2004). The story of German occupation of France during the Second World War. Split into two parts, it gives personal perspective to this turbulent era of French history.
• Timothy Garten Ash: Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (2023). Merges memoir, political analysis and social criticism to reflect on the future of a continent still haunted by its past.

Music played:
• The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem  The Croppy Boy    
• Joni Mitchell with The Chieftains The Magdalene Laundries