![]() The milky light of a winter afternoon, mist on a river, a woman opening an oven door, a child taking her father’s hand: We see these things and feel their lingering presence as we are drawn into the life of an unassuming man in an unremarkable place. Details materialize with preternatural clarity. Yet this exquisite miniature of a novel somehow defies the gravitational pull of its grim subject to hover in a quotidian, luminous present. ![]() ![]() Keegan dedicates her slim volume “to the women and children who suffered time” in these hellholes (the last closed only in 1996), and the convent forms the dark core of her narrative. ![]() For this institution, run by the Good Shepherd nuns, is one of the many Magdalene laundries in which tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and otherwise inconvenient young women were confined (with the consent of their families) to be punished as sinners and exploited as unpaid labor. Claire Keegans two collections of stories, Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007), get new covers to go with Foster and Small Things Like These. It was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Keegan writes, “with black, wide-open gates and a host of tall, shining windows, facing the town.” Plainly described, the edifice nonetheless emanates dread. Small Things Like These (2021) is Irish writer Claire Keegan’s fourth work of fiction. “The convent was a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river,” Ms. ![]()
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