Small Things Like These is a novella by Claire Keegan, an Irish author who, as the NYTimes describes, “harnesses the power in brevity.” Her short stories collections have won accolades including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the William Trevor Prize, and the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award. Small Things Like These, her latest work, follows a coal merchant named Bill Furlong who discovers the Magdalene asylums and its secrets over Christmas. It is a devastating story of goodness, courage, and religious hypocrisy. Despite being only 80 pages long, it carries a depth of a work far longer. Here are some quotes that stuck with me.

“It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything, Furlong knew. Although he did not venture far, he got around – and many an unfortunate he’d seen around town and out the country roads.”

“The next year, when he’d won first prize for spelling and was given a wooden pencil-case whose sliding top doubled as a ruler, Mrs Wilson had rubbed the top of his head and praised him, as though he was one of her own. ‘You’re a credit to yourself,’ she’d told him. And for a whole day or more, Furlong had gone around feeling a foot taller, believing, in his heart, that he mattered as much as any other child.”

“What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”

“She looked at the window and took a breath and began to cry, the way those unused to any type of kindness do when it’s at first or after a long time again encountered.”

“As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”

“The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured, and might yet surpass.”