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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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Small Things Like These

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022

by Claire Keegan

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Narrator Aidan Kelly

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Length 1 hour 57 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Claire Keegan works magic in this small novel about a truly good man in 1985 Ireland, and the difficult decision he faces at Christmastime. Keegan captures the extraordinary courage required to live an ordinary life with honor.”
— John Lynn • The Kennett Bookhouse

Bookseller recommendation

“What a gem. If fiction is a way to re write history, giving voice to the voiceless and overlooked, Clare Keegan has succeeded in telling of the a story of what can and did happen in a small Irish town. Set during the weeks leading up to Christmas, Small Things Like These is at once devastating and hopeful in its keen insight of the human heart as it can swell with joy, or chill with cruelty, This will be a book I sell perennially as the holidays come around in particular, and all through the year. We all need reminders what it feels like to listen to our loving instincts and do the right thing when it might be easier to turn away and get on with things. This is a lovely meditation on life and what happens when we if we don’t listen to our better angels. ”
— Sarah • Watermark Books

Bookseller recommendation

“The queen of the understated in my favourite of her books. It's about the choices we make and the communities we live in, family and what makes a person whole. Beautiful and heartbreaking and ultimately incredibly hopeful.”
— Katie • Betty Loves Books

Summary
About the author

***PRE-ORDER NOW***
THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOSTER, ANTARCTICA AND WALK THE BLUE FIELDS

'This is a tale of courage and compassion, of good sons and vulnerable young mothers. Absolutely beautiful.'

-Douglas Stuart (Winner of the Booker Prize 2020)
'Marvellous-exact and icy and loving all at once.' -Sarah Moss
'A haunting, hopeful masterpiece.' -Sinéad Gleeson
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.

The long-awaited new work from the author of Foster, Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.

'[Claire Keegan] creates luminous effects with spare material, so every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion.'

Hilary Mantel

Fiction Fiction - Literary

Claire Keegan's works of fiction are critically acclaimed international bestsellers - and have been translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award - the world's richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These, a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. So Late in the Day was published in the New Yorker and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. Keegan was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland in 2022, Author of the Year 2023, the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters 2024 and most recently the Siegfried Lenz Award.