Small Things Like These

The Cost of Decency - Great audiobook to listen to alone and carefully

In Small Things Like These, bravery arrives late and without safety. Claire Keegan strips it of uplift and moral theatre. What remains is a decision that threatens livelihood, family and standing, taken without reassurance.

Bill Furlong is settled, tired, respectable. His life runs on repetition: work, home, weather, routine. That steadiness matters. The risk he takes is not symbolic. It comes with dependants and consequences that will not fall on him alone.

The book narrows the space for action. There is no exposure or public reckoning. Only a moment when continuing as before becomes impossible. The town survives through managed silence. Everyone knows enough. No one presses further.

Furlong’s wife voices the prevailing logic. Protect what you have. Do not invite scrutiny. The nuns are charitable. The girls are wayward. Her position is coherent and socially functional. Keegan makes it persuasive.

The conflict is not goodness versus cruelty. It is decency set against stability. Choosing the former fractures the arrangements that keep life workable.

Keegan’s prose compresses rather than urges. Cold, labour and small observation do the work. The novella’s tight length mirrors the narrow margin within which moral action exists.

What lingers is the cost. The book offers no release and no restored balance. It leaves the risk intact. That restraint gives the act its weight — and the book its force.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is a masterfully crafted novella set in a small Irish town during the Christmas season of 1985. At its heart is Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, whose quiet life and routine are upended when he discovers the harsh realities behind the local convent’s Magdalen laundry—a notorious institution where women and girls were incarcerated and forced into labor.
Keegan’s prose is deceptively simple yet deeply evocative, immersing readers in the rhythms of rural Irish life. Her language, polished and precise, reflects both the beauty and the bleakness of her characters’ world. Through Bill’s eyes, we witness the tension between individual conscience and the pressures of a community complicit in silence. Bill, himself the child of a single mother, is portrayed as an ordinary man whose compassion and moral courage quietly build throughout the story, culminating in an act of defiance that is both understated and profound.
The novella draws clear parallels to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but instead of focusing on material redemption, Keegan explores spiritual and moral awakening. Bill’s internal struggle—whether to maintain the status quo or risk everything to do what is right—serves as a powerful indictment of the societal and religious structures that enabled the abuses of the Magdalen laundries.
Despite its brevity, the novel is rich in emotional depth. The domestic warmth of Bill’s home life is sharply contrasted with the institutional cruelty he uncovers, heightening the stakes of his moral dilemma. Keegan’s restraint in depicting the horrors of the laundries makes the story all the more chilling, relying on suggestion and the weight of what is left unsaid to convey the suffering endured by the women and girls.
Small Things Like These is both a damning portrait of Ireland’s recent past and a celebration of everyday decency. It is a story about the cost of kindness, the courage to act against injustice, and the hope that small acts can make a difference—even when the world would rather look away. This novella is a stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity, recommended for anyone drawn to literary fiction that finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Packaged with literary elegance, readers receive a thoughtful Christmas message.