Small Things Like These

Ireland, 1985. Bill Furlong runs a coal business in a modest town and provides for a wife and daughters. As December approaches, orders multiply and he throws himself into the work. One dawn, while making a coal delivery to a nearby convent, he comes across something that shakes him, pulling him toward memories he has kept buried and toward a question nobody locally wants asked: what everyone around him has agreed not to see. Claire Keegan, an Irish writer, tells the story in this short novel.