A specially seasonal Book on One comes to RTÉ Radio 1 this Christmas season, with author Claire Keegan reading her novel Small Things Like These in its entirety - listen to all the episodes broadcast to date here.
Small Things Like These was universally declared to be a classic when published last year. It is set in an Irish town in 1985 during the weeks leading up to Christmas. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, lives with his wife Eileen and their girls in town. He was brought up in the protestant house of Mrs Wilson out the road where his mother worked until she died when he was twelve; and he doesn't know who his father was. As he does his deliveries, Furlong 'feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
Small Things Like These catches the rituals, routines and weathers of the days before Christmas in small town Ireland: the switching on of the Christmas lights, the writing of letters to Santy, making the Christmas cake, the queues and banter between customers in the barbers, shopping for presents, approaching midnight mass, and falling snow. All this alongside the exposure of the unfairness and hypocrisy of the world and the riot of human emotions, that somehow the season of Christmas exacerbates, intensifies and exposes, especially this particular Christmas for Billy Furlong.
All Book on One episodes of Small Things Like These read by Claire Keegan are available here.
