Though Furlong has risen from being spat upon in the schoolyard to owning a modest business, he is keenly aware that it "would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything." Indeed, the fate his mother escaped is embodied in the nearby "training school" run by nuns for girls who, imprisoned, work in the convent's commercial laundry. His mother, pregnant with him at 16 while in domestic service, was unexpectedly lucky in her employer, a Protestant widow who treated her and the child with kindness and generosity. It is 1985 and Bill Furlong, 39, married father of five daughters, is a fuel merchant in New Ross, County Wexford, in Ireland. "Small Things Like These" is a short, wrenching, thoroughly brilliant novel mapping the path of one man's conscience, its torment and vacillation between two courses of action. Claire Keegan, award-winning author of two collections of short stories and a novella, now gives us her best work yet.
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