Small Things Like These (Oprah's Book Club)

I felt like this had just started to pick up and then it was over!

A masterclass in how to say a lot by saying very little. My book group universally loved it and that’s really saying something!

A small, beautifully written book, very poignant. This tale illustrates a crisis of conscience when doing the right thing means risking everything.

Depressing. Would be better as an expanded story instead of a short story. As in true Oprah form, it is a deeply emotional book.

Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” is a novella about the random acts of kindness that remind us of our common humanity. We get a glimpse into the life of Bill Furlong and his family trying to survive the stark realities of 1980s Ireland. The story manages to go remarkably deep and stir a lot of thoughts for a work of such brevity. This snapshot need not be long to capture the leering heaviness that over Ireland during this period. The smallest peek into Bill’s environment is enough to tug at all the heartstrings. Still, for all the blight, Keegan offers us vignettes of beauty that act as moments of sunshine on a country and people trying to find their footing. Chief among them is Bill trying to find small moments of hope against the monotony of everyday life. In these little moments, we see a reminder of what life is about. The whole book raises the question of how to deal with suffering on this scale. Is it better to retreat to individualism in hard times or lean deeper into collectivism? All the characters are struggling to different degrees. The desire for something more is the common thread between them. That “more” is indefinite; like some arbitrarily fixed amount from an abstract whole. In reality, something more simply starts with the simple act of being seen and seeing others. Something Bill does and in doing so acknowledges the significance of acknowledging the suffering of others even against your own.