Claire Keegan is a writer’s writer — lauded by the likes of William Trevor, who chose her first short story collection, Antarctica (1999), for the William Trevor Prize; Hilary Mantel, who gave her second short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields (2007), the Edge Hill Short Story Prize; and Richard Ford, who awarded Foster the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in 2009. Now, nearly 25 years into her career, her work is also finding the popular audience that it deserves. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It also won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for tackling the open secret of the Catholic Church’s Magdalene Laundries, where, even as late as 1985, when Keegan’s novella is set, unwed mothers were sent to give birth and other outcast girls were kept out of sight.

Foster is now in print for the first time in the United States, having had an unusual path to publication. It first appeared in the New ...