A Masterful Depiction of Male Cruelty
Halfway through Small Things Like These, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted 2022 novel, something out of the ordinary happens. The coal merchant Bill Furlong discovers during a Christmas-week delivery that a young woman has been shut in a nunnery’s coal shed overnight. Her bare feet are black with dust; she has had to go to the toilet where she slept. Horror is shot into the narrative like a hidden pouch of stage blood being pierced.