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Published Nov 2021
128 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The landmark new novel from award-winning author Claire Keegan.
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
"[G]ripping...Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong's emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting...A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Keegan's beautiful prose is quiet and precise, jewel-like in its clarity. Highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Irish story writer Keegan's gorgeously textured second novella (after Foster) centers on a family man who wants to do the right thing....Keegan beautifully conveys Bill's interior life...Readers will be touched." - Publishers Weekly
"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
This information about Small Things Like These was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and are translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was 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 won the Davy Byrnes Award then the world's richest prize for a story. These works have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. Small Things Like These was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the finest book in any genre published in the English language. Foster is now part of the school syllabus in Ireland.
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