Small things like these by Claire Keegan

I read this book straight after Winnie M Li's novel Complicit and discovered that Small Things Like These is another example of something terrible going on that many people must have known about, but no-one dared challenge.

Imagine a world where women could be locked away for years, or even life, for having sex outside of marriage or even accused of behaving in a flirtatious manner. Even those raped as under-age girls could be taken from their families and and set to work as slaves in money-making laundries; their babies taken from them and given away to strangers (if they survived).

Most shockingly, that world was Ireland where the Catholic Church ran the Magdalene Laundries right up until the 1990's and they only stopped because the nuns accidentally exposed the truth of what was going on behind their locked doors.

Claire Keegan's beautifully written book presents the situation as a dark shadow sitting in an Irish community where people go about their business turning their eyes and ears away from the truth out of fear of the church. The temptation to write a much more vindictive account must have been there, but Keegan allows the light to dawn slowly and in the end, her gentle approach is very powerful.

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