10/14/2025
Hillsboro Forest Grove book discussion pick for December!
Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These" is barely over two hours long. I started it during a morning commute thinking I'd finish it over a few days.
I sat in my parked car for forty minutes after arriving because I couldn't stop listening.
This is supposedly a story about a coal merchant making deliveries during Christmas week in 1985 Ireland. That sounds boring. It's not. It's the kind of quiet that makes your hands grip the steering wheel tighter, where every unsaid thing builds until you realize you've been holding your breath.
Aidan Kelly narrates like he's telling you something he wishes he didn't know, his Irish voice wrapping around Keegan's sparse prose in a way that makes silence feel loud.
Bill Furlong is just trying to provide for his family. He delivers coal, goes home to his wife and daughters, tries to be a decent man in a town where decency requires looking the other way. Then he sees something at the local convent. Something he wasn't supposed to see.
I won't tell you what. Keegan reveals it so carefully that spoiling it would steal the creeping dread that builds with every chapter. But it involves the Magdalene laundries—those institutions where the Catholic Church sent "fallen women" to disappear.
Suddenly this small story becomes about what it costs to do the right thing when everyone around you has chosen silence. Bill isn't a hero. He's just a man who saw something and now can't unknow it. Does he protect his family by staying quiet? Or does he risk everything for one small act that might not even matter?
I found myself whispering "don't" at my phone, even though I didn't know if I was telling him don't act or don't stay silent.
The brilliance is how Keegan makes this internal struggle feel like physical danger. Bill's thoughts circle and tighten. The town watches. His wife knows something's wrong. The nuns smile their cold smiles. And you sit there, stomach knotted, as one ordinary man wrestles with his own conscience.
This is about small acts of courage against institutional evil. About how good people become complicit through silence. About the Ireland that let these laundries exist because acknowledging them would cost too much.
I finished it in one sitting, then sat in my car trying to figure out what it had done to me. Because Keegan doesn't just tell Bill's story. She makes you ask what you would do, whether you'd have his courage, whether you're already choosing not to see things that would require you to act.
Short books shouldn't be able to wreck you like this. But here we are.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3W2scVp
You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.
