Hay Festival Book Club - November 2024
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
An exquisite winter tale of courage – and its cost, set in Catholic Ireland, Small Things Like These was a book of the year in The Times, The New Statesman, Observer, Financial Times, Irish Times, Irish Independent, Times Literary Supplement, and named one of the New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century.
Read it? Let us know what you think on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram using #HFBookClub.
Further reading
Claire Keegan: “I can’t explain my work. I just write stories, The Guardian
On drama versus tension, The New Yorker
About the author
Claire Keegan's works of fiction are internationally acclaimed and have been translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award—then the world’s richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These, a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year. So Late in the Day was longlisted for the Story Prize. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland (2022), Author of the Year (2023), the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters, and the Siegfried Lenz Award (2024).
About Hay Festival Book Club
Timeless titles to offer you a break from the day to day. Can't decide what to read next? Follow your curiosity and join Hay Festival on a journey to imagine the world anew through great literature. Unconstrained by genre or form these are our monthly picks of great books worth reading (or re-reading) right now.
Throughout the month, we'll share interesting links and articles relating to our selection on social media using #HFBookClub and invite you all to get involved with your questions and comments. Each selection will also be marked with a free online event.
If you'd like to recommend a book for consideration, get in touch via bookclub@hayfestival.org.
Happy reading!