WILLOUGHBY BOOK + FILM CLUB
Small Things Like These
by Claire Keegan
FRIDAY | 27 MARCH
Movie Screening: 5.30 pm
Book & Film Talk: 7 pm
Read the book, watch the movie. Let’s Talk.
Call to register: 203-488-8702
Pick up a copy of the book at the library.
Also available on Hoopla & Libby with your library membership.
For home viewing, the movie is also streaming on several channels including Apple TV, Amazon Prime, YouTube.
HOW IT WORKS
Read the book.
Watch the film at home at your leisure or come to the screening at the library.
Screening time is 5.30. If you’ve already watched film, come at 7 for the discussion.
Tea & cookies will be served. Maybe popcorn!
THE BOOK
Claire Keegan’s multi-award-winning, bestselling novel Small Things Like These.
The Irish Times #1 Best Book of the 21st Century
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him — and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
“This exquisite miniature of a novel somehow defies the gravitational pull of its grim subject to hover in a quotidian, luminous present. Details materialize with preternatural clarity. The milky light of a winter afternoon, mist on a river, a woman opening an oven door, a child taking her father’s hand: We see these things and feel their lingering presence as we are drawn into the life of an unassuming man in an unremarkable place.”—Wall Street Journal
“I haven’t stopped thinking about [this] book, both because of Keegan’s luminous prose and because of the crisis of conscience that unspools within its pages.”—The New Yorker, “The Year in Reading” Selection.
THE AUTHOR
Claire Keegan’s works of fiction are internationally acclaimed and have been translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award—then the world’s richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These, a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year. So Late in the Day was longlisted for the Story Prize. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland (2022), Author of the Year (2023), the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters, and the Siegfried Lenz Award (2024).
THE FILM
The film adaptation of the book directed by Tim Meilants, starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, Michelle Fairley.
2024 Nominee Golden Berlin Bear Best Film, Berlin International Film Festival
2025 Best Lead Actor, Cillian Murphy, Irish Film and Television Awards.
2025 Best Film, Irish Film and Television Awards.
“Small Things Like These casts a powerful spell.
Fresh from his best actor Oscar win for Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy produces and stars as melancholic Bill Furlong, who can’t seem to look anyone in the eye. Bill was born out of wedlock, born into shame, but now has a home and a family and a job hauling truckloads of coal around town. His life is fine, or at least an improvement on what went before. Then one winter morning he discovers a young woman in the shed outside the local Magdalene laundry. The past is not dead; it is still whispering in his ear.” — The Guardian
“…a marvel of a performance, extremely expressive and yet deeply inward-looking…”
“…haunting, meditative, and quietly devastating…”
“…I was so rapt, so caught up in this film, that I wasn’t aware that it was going to be the ending until the screen faded to black…”