Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan - 2021

 

Small Things Like These - by Claire Keegan. - 2021

Following an eight year hiatus, it is very gratifying to be once again reading a work by Claire Keegan.  It is already being acclaimed as a masterpiece.  

Praise for Small Things Like These:

“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

Set in a small town in Western Ireland, the central character Bill Furlong, forty, married to Elaine, with five daughter, orphaned early in life, was raised with the utmost care by Mrs Wilson, a widow.  She gave him a few thousand to start a coal and Log business that sustains the family in comfort and provides work for a number of men.  He gives credit to those who need Help.  Bill works very hard, six at least days a week.

Keegan perfectly evokes not just The place but Christmas Season 1985.  The family dyamics are perfect.As Bill makes his deliveries he tries to collect as much of his invoices as he can.  The people are marvelously depicted.  His biggest customer is a nunnery that takes in wayward or unwanted girls and puts them to work in one of the now infamous Magdalene Laundries.  

I do not want to give away any of the plot.  I do think this has the potential to become a classic. 

Irish writer Claire Keegan’s debut collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. The Observer called these stories: ‘Among the finest recently written in English’. It was also awarded the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. 

In 2007, her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to huge critical acclaim and went on to win The Edge Hill Prize for the strongest collection published in The British Isles. The prize was adjudicated by Hilary Mantel. 

Foster (2010) won The Davy Byrnes Award, then the world’s richest prize for a story. It judged by Richard Ford: “Keegan is a rarity-someone I will always want to read’.” 

Keegan’s stories are published in English by Faber & Faber, have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, Best American Stories, won numerous awards – and are translated into 17 languages.  She is internationally renowned as a teacher of creative writing.  From https://ckfictionclinic.com/about/