SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE by Claire Keegan, read by Aidan Kelly

AudioFile’s Leslie Fine and host Jo Reed discuss how this brief novel set in a small Irish town in 1985 is no bucolic Irish tale. Aiden Kelly gives a masterful narration. Bill Furlong, the son of an unwed mother and now a coal merchant with a family, leads a comfortable life.During a coal delivery to the town’s convent, he finds a young woman locked and freezing in an outbuilding. As he learns more, he is shaken by the fate of the occupants of the Magdalene schools/laundries for unwed mothers and their babies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices