A short review for this short beautiful novel by the acclaimed Irish writer. This is based on the life of an ordinary coal merchant, Bill Furlong, who never knew who his father was, in a small coastal town. His silent internal philosophical musings, as he reflects on doing nothing but working to support his family, eating, and sleeping are actually quite perceptive, He asks quite profound questions about the meaning of his life, like the Peggy Lee song Is That All There Is? “It seemed both proper and at the same time somehow deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.”
“Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered….and could not help but wonder what the days were for.”
His encounter with a postpartum teen girl locked into the convent coal bin from the school for unwed mothers/laundry/jail shocks him into moral reckoning with himself and raises troublesome questions about the whole community almost totally under the control of the Catholic Church. It is based loosely on the real experiences of many of the Irish folk by their troubled relationship to Catholicism and the Madeline laundries operated by it until 1097. No easy answers are provided.
A beautifully written tale that is both simple and profound, inviting and appalling at the same time. Highly recommended.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thanks, Din.
The Passionate Reader 