Finishing off #NovNov with two novellas by Irish author, Claire Keegan.

I was immediately engrossed in the first, Small Things Like These. Keegan’s writing is immersive, and I was plunged into the chilly lead-up to Christmas in a small Irish town, with families gathering for Mass; the aroma of baking; the main character, Furlong, delivering coal and wood; and the gothic convent casting a cold shadow over it all.

Furlong is having somewhat of an existential crisis, and is keenly aware that although times are hard for many, his family is relatively comfortable.

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.

His deliveries to the convent, and a chance meeting with one of the girls shuttered away there, distresses him, and he realises that the smallest turn of events can change the course of a person’s life.

It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

Furlong’s revelations about his own past and what happens next is done with masterful restraint, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps. And it is because of this, that Furlong’s story (and the real life story of the Magdalene Laundries will linger.

The second, Foster, charmed me from page one. How does Keegan manage to make you care so deeply for a character within the first few paragraphs?

The story centres around an unnamed girl, whose mother can hardly manage the many children she has, let alone the baby that’s about to arrive. So the girl is sent to a farm ‘…deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from’, to be looked after by the Kinsellas, a childless couple who show her kindness on a scale previously foreign to her.

I’m in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

With the lightest of touch, and firmly maintaining the perspective of the girl, Keegan reveals that the Kinsellas nurse their own sorrow, and this adds another dimension to the plot.

Keegan has an incredible ability to draw meaning out of the ordinary moments in a day. The collection of the mail; the picking of scallions; a walk on the beach; a hot bath – each of these become a measure of how the girl blossoms under the Kinsellas’ care.

Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they’re happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

When a letter from her mother arrives, the girl grapples with conflicting loyalties, and wishes that instead of returning to her parents and siblings, ‘…that this place without shame or secrets could be my home.’

I won’t reveal the ending, short of saying that the final poignant scene left me in tatters.

4/5 Two gems.