Book Club Guide

Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan · 2021 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The Magdalene laundries and the town that knew
Bill Furlong's own origins — the kindness that saved his mother
Complicity, courage and the cost of one small act

About this book

In the weeks before Christmas 1985, coal merchant Bill Furlong makes a delivery to the local convent in a small Irish town and discovers something that forces him to choose between his community's complicit silence and his own conscience. Keegan's miniature masterpiece about the Magdalene laundries is one of the shortest novels ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Published in 2021, Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize — the shortest book ever shortlisted — and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Ireland's last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996. It was adapted into a 2024 film starring Cillian Murphy.

Discussion questions

Bill Furlong's mother was an unmarried teenager taken in by a Protestant widow rather than sent to a laundry. How does Keegan use this backstory — and how does it weigh on his choice at the convent?
The town's silence about the laundry is total and self-protecting. How does Keegan show the machinery of complicity without a single villain speech?
The novel is barely a hundred pages. What does Keegan's compression achieve — and what would a longer treatment of the same material lose?
The ending stops at the moment of Bill's act, before any consequences arrive. Why does Keegan end here — and what do you imagine follows?
Small Things Like These is dedicated to the women and children of the laundries. How does fiction serve historical reckoning here — and what can a novel do that the official reports could not?