After listening to a podcast of Cillian Murphy promoting his latest Netflix movies (Steve), Small Things Like These was mentioned as one of his recommended books. So I checked it in book platform and it does not have that much pages, so why not? I read it and, wow, the title really describe the books literally and figuratively. It is small in number of pages, tells a story about small things, yet it gives a huge meaning that making it really impressive book.
It tells the story of Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant living an ordinary, unglamorous life in a small Irish town. He has a loving wife and five daughters, and while times are hard when factories shutting down and people losing work, his family is not in poverty. They have enough to eat, and they aren’t living on credit. On the surface, it is a contented life.
But as Christmas approaches, Bill begins to feel an ache under that ordinariness, a kind of spiritual fatigue. “What was it all for?” he asks himself. Born fatherless but raised by the kindness of a wealthy widow, he has built a stable life through hard work and decency. He is well-liked, a familiar, trusted face in the community. And yet, “he was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere… and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.”
The turning point comes when he makes a delivery to the local convent and encounters something quietly unsettling. It stirs something in him. A question he can no longer silence: what is the purpose of a life that only survives but never dares to do what is right?
As he continues his rounds, he begins to see his world differently, wondering if a life without helping others is truly a life at all. The things closest to him, the things he once overlooked, suddenly come into an uncomfortable focus. And still, he wants to believe in human goodness, even while recognizing how fragile, and sometimes painful, that goodness can be.
Small Things Like These may be a short book, but it moves the reader as much as a long book. It’s not driven by plot twists or drama, but by moral weight, the kind that asks you, what you would do if you witnessed something wrong. I love how Claire Keegan writes with such restraint yet manages to reveal so much about loneliness, dignity, compassion, and courage in ordinary life.
If you enjoy character-driven books, slow quiet mornings, and stories that explore the cost of goodness, this is a deeply moving read worth picking up, especially when you’re in the mood for something short but meaningful.
My Favorite Bits
- What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.
- As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
- Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?
- The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.
- People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with others as well as your own. But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn’t given the sweets and other things he’d been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.
Author: Claire Keegan
Publication date: 5 November 2021
Number of pages: 128 pages
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