Service95 Recommends is the home of the books we love and our contributors’ reviews. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is a novella set in 1908s Ireland, telling the story of a rural community struggling with a moral dilemma.
What Patrick Radden Keefe Says: “Probably my favourite novel of the last several years, another Irish story, this one not about the Troubles but about the way silence and denial can suppress the truth and prolong injustice in a small community.”
What They Say: “A single one of Keegan’s grounded, powerful sentences can contain volumes of social history. Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving”— Hilary Mantel
Available on Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble
Read More: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Recommended Reading List
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Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of Dua’s Monthly Read for June 2024, Say Nothing
