Small Things Like These

I've been hearing about Small Things Like These for weeks now, and everything I heard about it was good, so I have been waiting and waiting for the single copy of it in our huge library system to arrive for me for a long time. I worried that I might have pumped up my expectations for this book, and that I would be disappointed; I did not.

Small Things Like These is a small book about small lives in a small town. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant, and it's winter, and Furlong is busily trying to keep all his customers fully stocked. He is married and has five girls, and he's respected in the community, but his life was not always so smooth. His mother became pregnant with him out of wedlock, and things could have been horrible for Bill and his mother, but, unexpectedly, his mother's employer kept her on, and everything changed for Bill.

When Bill is faced with a difficult situation, he must make a moral judgment about how to proceed. Whatever path he decides to take will not be easy.


Here are some quotes that might offer some small spoilers...read with caution...

“What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”

“Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”

“He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”

“He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life. Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place. In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving – if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.”