Ireland, 1985, Bill Furlong is at his busiest with coal deliveries in the lead-up to Christmas when he comes face-to-face with the local convent’s open secret…

With her remarkable ability to imply so much with so few words, Keegan is undeniably the queen of concise prose - this is a novel of reading between the lines of what people say and don’t say, both in terms of the reader and the characters themselves.

This is a poignant story of community complicity in the open secret of the Irish Catholic Church’s laundries - the abstract knowledge of what is happening can be swept under the rug, but what to do when actually confronted with the truth face-to-face? It’s well-written and Keegan perfectly captures the factors driving the community complicity - faith, denial, fear of ostracism. But I’m actually not sure Bill was the most effective character to tell the story - I’d have really liked his wife, Eileen’s perspective, either for the whole story or as an additional POV. She had such a vehement reaction that it would have been interesting to explore where that came from.

Although the outcome beyond the end of the novel is implied, I was left a little dissatisfied. I’d have liked to actually see the community’s response and how the unfurling of the Church’s long tentacles would play out. It felt as if there was more story to be told, and the novella would have benefitted from being slightly longer and including the fallout.

A remarkably concise and poignant story of community complicity in 1980s Ireland and facing an individual moral reckoning.