RTÉ Radio 1's Book On One offers a specially seasonal title this Christmas, with author Claire Keegan reading her novel Small Things Like These nightly at 11.20 pm during Late Date until Friday 22nd December, and exclusively here in its entirety until 20th January 2024.
Small Things Like These was universally declared to be a classic when published in 2021. The book is as keenly sought out as ever, and continued to be a best-seller this year too. Soon it will be experienced as a film, with Cillian Murphy in the part of its main protagonist, Bill Furlong and Eileen Walsh playing his wife, also called Eileen.
Small Things Like These 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 Christmas for Billy Furlong.
All episodes of Small Things Like These, read by Claire Keegan are available via the Book On One webpage.
