How can one writer convey so much in only 110 pages? Claire Keegan doesn’t waste a word. It’s almost like reading a poem.

Set in 1985 in a small Irish town, Bill Furlong is a busy man in the weeks leading up to Christmas. He has a comfortable life with his wife and five daughters, but something is disturbing his peace of mind; something he can’t quite put into words. ‘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.’ 

Keegan explores the complicity of ordinary folk in the shocking treatment of unwed mothers by the Catholic nuns at the local Magdalen laundry. The church has a stranglehold on the community, and no one is prepared to raise a hand to defend the defenceless. However, when Bill is faced with the reality of the brutal way these girls are treated, he choses to act, as ‘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?’

Bill knows that there will be repercussions for his action, ‘but the worst that could have happened was 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’. Keegan finishes the book on a hopeful note, where the reader is left with the sense that one small action, by one person, can indeed have a ripple effect.

In her Author’s Notes, Keegan records the shocking number of babies and children, not to mention young mothers, who died while incarcerated in Magdalen laundries. One report revealed that over nine thousand children died in eighteen of the institutions investigated. The Catholic Church, together with the Irish State, ran and financed these institutions.