Reading Group Roundup: Small Things Like These

It’s a very short book, first published in 2021 and then adapted in 2024 as a film starring Cillian Murphy. It’s set in the 1980s and centres on Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish town which is dominated by the Catholic Church. Bill is an ordinary man whose life revolves around his work and his family of wife and five daughters. But he is faced with a moment that will change his life forever when he discovers what is happening to the young women in the convent above the town.

Over the last year or so, groups who chose the book include Wandsworth, Pentonville, High Down, Brixton, Bullingdon, Buckley Hall and Shotts, and they had some great discussions. Almost all of them commented on how hard it was to recognise the 1980s setting – ‘it seemed much more like the 1950s or even the 1940s’, ‘it could have been 200 years ago if you swap out the cars for horses’. The book is also sprinkled with Irish words which threw some – ‘no idea what “stotious” or “leanbh” mean and nor does the English dictionary!’. But the language brought back childhood memories for others –

‘the Waterford colloquialisms were reminiscent of any conversation I had with my grandparents’.

More than anything the book is about ordinariness transformed into heroism. But it’s a slow burn and for some it took a while to draw them in.

‘I didn’t think it would be my kind of book, especially the ordinariness of the beginning. But it takes hold of you and by the end I loved it’.

One insomniac reader said he’d read it between midnight and 3 am and enjoyed getting to know Bill through the night. ‘And I loved the way the plot throws a bomb into that careful, safe life Bill has set up for himself. It’s as though he doesn’t have any choice except to do the courageous thing.’

The novel is partly about knowing and not knowing at the same time. At some level the townspeople know what’s going on in the convent but they collectively ignore it. One reader made the comparison with Nazi Germany and what ordinary people chose not to know about the camps and the Holocaust.

It’s a book with a lot of unspoken meaning, especially around the ending. In the last paragraph we read ‘The worst was yet to come, he knew. He could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door’. For some, it was frustrating: ‘But what happens next?’ For others it was what made the story stay with them. One member hadn’t yet read the book but had seen the film when it came out. ‘I didn’t like not knowing what happened at the end but it all stayed in my head – in fact it’s still there’.

Prison Reading Groups (PRG) was created in 1999 to set up, support and fund informal reading groups in prisons. We currently support more than 110 groups in over 80 prisons nationwide. PRG is part of registered charity Give a Book.