Small Mercies

Small Things Like These is the slimmest and possibly the most uplifting book on the Booker shortlist

With Christmas around the corner, coal merchant Bill Furlong, the instantly likeable protagonist of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, has his hands full. Deliveries must be made on the one hand, while his wife and five daughters must be tended to on another. Barring an existential question or two—“Always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things?”—Furlong seems to meet the demands of work and family with a quiet fortitude. Like all good things, the steady calm of his life is interrupted. One morning, he finds a girl locked in a convent’s coal shed, scared, dishevelled.