Books like Small Things Like These, for the question it asks, not the snow
Content note
This is not a list of cosy winter reads. The Light in the Window and Republic of Shame are true accounts of Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes, including forced labour, women denied pain relief in childbirth, and children taken for adoption. The Assault and Alone in Berlin involve killings and reprisals under Nazi occupation and rule, and Silence includes torture. Each entry says what it is.
Start with The Assault for a town’s complicity, Republic of Shame for what the laundries and homes really were, and A Whole Life if what you want is Keegan’s stillness in 160 pages. Last verified 17 September 2026.
Read Foster, obviously. But you didn’t search for this to be told to read the other Claire Keegan, and it opens nearly every other page for this book.
Why these, and not more short winter books
The pages we checked on 16 and 17 September 2026 (BookBrowse, meetnewbooks, Goodreads, bookdna.com and the Booker Prizes’ December spotlight) match this novella on the things you can see from the cover: it is short, quiet, set at Christmas and easy to give as a present. Goodreads files it on lists of books to give as gifts. But Keegan has said the book is about why people did nothing when everyone knew what the laundries were. That is the thread this page follows: complicity, the institutions themselves, the ordinary man at the centre, and, last, the compression.
What Highstreett returned for “books like Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan”
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
- Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín (2009)
- The Sea, John Banville (2005)
- The Master Butchers Singing Club, Louise Erdrich (1975)
- The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (2011)
- The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
See this result · run 17 September 2026
Editor’s verdict: It matched on voice and restraint, which the novella deserves: Gilead, Brooklyn, The Sea, The Remains of the Day and The Sense of an Ending are all quiet, inward novels, and The Master Butchers Singing Club adds a small town in North Dakota. None of its six touches the laundries or the question of what a town knows and does nothing about, which is why none of them appears below.
If what stayed with you was the town that looked away
Keegan has said she wanted to understand why people did nothing when everyone knew what the laundries were. These two novels are about exactly that: ordinary people, and what they did or didn't do when doing something had a cost.
1. The Assault, Harry Mulisch (1982)
novel · Dutch, wartime and after · under 200 pages · translated by Claire Nicolas White
In Haarlem in January 1945, a collaborator is shot in the street. Neighbours move his body in front of the house next door, and the Germans burn that house and kill the family inside, all but the twelve-year-old son. Over forty years he learns who moved the body, and why. The best novel we know about ordinary complicity, and on none of the five pages we checked. Differs: it opens with a killing and keeps returning to it, so it is darker from the first page than Keegan ever is.
2. Alone in Berlin (US title: Every Man Dies Alone), Hans Fallada (1947)
novel · Nazi Berlin · long, gripping · translated by Michael Hofmann
After their son is killed in France, a working-class Berlin couple start leaving anti-Nazi postcards around the city: a small act with almost no chance of changing anything, which is the point. Furlong's decision, scaled up and made dangerous. Fallada wrote it in 1946, soon after surviving the regime himself. Differs: nearly 600 pages, and a thriller in pace. It is here for the decision at its centre, not the length. Penguin's 2009 translation was a publishing event, so many readers will know it already.
If you want to know what really happened
These are non-fiction, and they are hard to read. Both are about Ireland's mother-and-baby homes, which were closely tied to the laundries in Keegan's story and often run by the same religious orders.
3. The Light in the Window, June Goulding (1998)
memoir · Cork, 1951 · distressing
In 1951 a young midwife took a job at the Bessborough mother-and-baby home in Cork. She describes women denied pain relief in labour as a penance, made to work, and parted from their children. She waited more than forty years to write it. It is the testimony of someone who stood where Furlong stands and had to decide what to do. On none of the five pages we checked. Differs: it is out of print, so you will need a second-hand copy or a library (see the editions table).
4. Republic of Shame, Caelainn Hogan (2019)
reportage · Ireland's institutions · readable
A journalist investigates the mother-and-baby homes, the religious orders that ran them, and the state and society that kept them going, talking to the women who were sent there and their children. It answers, with evidence, the question Keegan said her novel was asking. On none of the five pages we checked.
If it was the ordinary man at the centre
Furlong is not brave, clever or special. These two novels are built around unremarkable men, and a faith that doesn't make things easier.
5. The Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos (1936)
novel · Catholic France · quiet, inward · translated by Howard Curtis
A young, sickly, ineffectual priest keeps a journal of his first parish in northern France: the petty cruelties, the boredom, the parishioners who despise him, and what grace looks like when it changes nothing you can see. The closest thing on this page to Keegan's withheld prose, and a Catholic novel that asks Keegan's question from inside the Church. On none of the five pages we checked. Differs: slower, and more about the priest's soul than about anyone he could save.
6. Silence, Shūsaku Endō (1966)
novel · 17th-century Japan · harrowing · translated by William Johnston
A Portuguese priest in Japan, searching for his mentor who is said to have renounced the faith, is pushed towards the question of whether the faithful thing and the merciful thing are the same. The great Catholic novel of moral failure, and the reverse of Furlong's choice. Differs: it includes torture, and Martin Scorsese's 2016 film means many readers already know the ending.
If you want that same stillness in few pages
The shape of Keegan's writing, short and unsentimental, without the subject. The one Irish town novel here is also about a community's silence.
7. A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler (2014)
novel · Austrian Alps · about 160 pages · translated by Charlotte Collins
The whole life of a labourer in an Alpine valley, told in 160 pages without a wasted word or a stated feeling. The safest pick on this page for a reader who simply wants the Keegan feeling again. Differs: shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and widely read, so this is a strong recommendation rather than a discovery.
8. The Spinning Heart, Donal Ryan (2012)
novel · Irish town after the crash · many voices
Twenty-one people from one Irish town after the 2008 crash, each chapter a different neighbour, circling the same events and the same things nobody says. The best contemporary Irish novel we know about a community's silence, and Ryan is on none of the five pages we checked. Differs: set in the 2010s, and much angrier and funnier than Keegan.
9. Academy Street, Mary Costello (2014)
novel · rural Ireland to New York · restrained
Tess leaves the west of Ireland for New York in the 1960s and lives a quiet, diminished life that almost nobody sees. Keegan's restraint applied to the woman who left rather than the man who stayed. It was the Irish Book Awards' Book of the Year in 2014. Differs: no single moral choice drives it; it is a life, not a decision.
The honest bit
If someone gave you Small Things Like These for Christmas and you want another short, gentle book, start at the end of this page: A Whole Life and Academy Street. Four of the nine deal directly with institutional abuse or wartime killing, and two are true. They are here because they are the books this novella is in conversation with, not because they feel like it.
The page is thinner at the top than we wanted. Two books we would have led with, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, were already on the first page of a list we checked, so they are named here rather than numbered. Both are still worth your time.
Which edition you can buy in the UK
Translations differ, so the translator is part of the edition. This is what each publisher, or Blackwell’s where noted, showed on 17 September 2026.
| Book | Translator | ISBN | Published | Publisher | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Assault | Claire Nicolas White | 9781805221678 | 13 March 2025 | Serpent's Tail Classics | £10.99; introduction by Thomas Harding |
| Alone in Berlin | Michael Hofmann | 9780141189383 | 28 January 2010 | Penguin Modern Classics | In print at Penguin UK |
| The Light in the Window | — | 9781853718922 | 1998 | Poolbeg | Out of print; Blackwell's could not supply it; second-hand or library |
| Republic of Shame | — | 9780241984123 | 16 July 2020 | Penguin | In stock at Blackwell's |
| The Diary of a Country Priest | Howard Curtis | 9780241381809 | 3 October 2019 | Penguin Modern Classics | £12.99; a new translation, not the older Pamela Morris one |
| Silence | William Johnston | 9781035038862 | 2024 | Picador | Blackwell's listed it as not available for sale; check before ordering |
| A Whole Life | Charlotte Collins | 9781837266593 | 9 April 2026 | Canongate | £9.99; Canongate's new edition |
| The Spinning Heart | — | 9781784165000 | 30 July 2026 (this printing) | Black Swan (Transworld) | £9.99 at Penguin UK |
| Academy Street | — | 9781805302339 | 7 March 2024 | Canongate | £9.99 |
Questions
Is Small Things Like These based on a true story?
The characters are invented, but the Magdalene laundries were real. Run by Catholic religious orders with the support of the Irish state, they held women and girls and made them work without pay; the last one closed in 1996. Keegan sets the novella in New Ross, County Wexford, in December 1985.
What should I read after Small Things Like These?
For the same subject, Harry Mulisch's The Assault (1982), a Dutch novel about neighbours whose small act of self-protection gets a family killed. For the history behind the novella, Caelainn Hogan's Republic of Shame (2019). For the same stillness in few pages, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life (2014).
What else has Claire Keegan written?
Foster (2010), a novella about a girl sent to live with relatives for a summer, and So Late in the Day (2023), a novella about a man and the woman who left him. Read both. They are left out of the numbered list only because every other page leads with them.
If you want the next book to be about one of these threads and not the others, say which, and the book search will narrow it.
Find a book on the thread you want to follow
For another page that sorts a much-loved novel by what it is doing rather than how it looks, see Books like Butter.