89 books like Small Things Like These

What can one say about this classic? It is the quintessential story of old Dublin.

Published in 1914, the collection of fifteen short stories takes the reader on a journey through middle-class Ireland, touching on Irish nationalism and country pride, but also on the forces that were slowing changing Ireland at the time. The stories move chronologically from boyhood to manhood and culminate with what some critics say is the finest short story ever written, “The Dead.”

This story, like many others in Dubliners is both a meditation on everyday urban life and a study of human relationships, including how we live with our memories, our heritage, and how we find ways to manifest our personal emotions.

This is a peculiar and marvelous book about birth families, adopted families, and “found” families, and how each of these can be equally screwed up.

Starting in Ireland in the 1940s, the story is peppered with sharp, clever dialog and vivid, fully-human characters. I love how the narrator struggles with his own heart for decades, unable to decide what he wants, who he loves, what’s right, what’s wrong, etc.—in other words, all the stuff I haven’t figured out yet myself. 

Coincidence also plays a huge role in this book, basically making an ass of everyone, which I find oddly comforting since it reminds me that part of being human is having very little control over my own life. Painfully funny and brilliant from cover to cover. 

I came across this memoir while researching Irish mother and baby homes for my own novel. June Goulding was a young midwife in the 1950s when she was hired by the Sacred Heart Convent in Cork.  Here she found girls,  some as young as 13, punished for the sin of being pregnant, forced to work, tarring roads, scrubbing floors, and rearing their children until they were handed over for adoption – in exchange for a donation to the church – often without their consent. Thirty years later, haunted by what she was party to, Goulding tells the story of how she tried to relieve the suffering of these unfortunate women. 

I was so struck by this candid memoir from Angela Patrick about what happened to her when she became pregnant in the early sixties at nineteen that it made me consider my mother’s lucky escape when the same thing happened to her. Both were Catholic and unmarried, but Patrick, unlike my mother, turned to her family for help and was exiled to a mother and baby home. It’s a tale of shame and sorrow, coldness and cruelty – and the scars that remain when a baby is given up.

This 1965 novel by English author Margaret Drabble follows protagonist and PhD student Rosamund as she becomes a single mother.

Educated, upper-middle-class Rosamund narrates with a quintessentially British and—for me—highly enjoyable blend of primness and humor. Fascinatingly and somewhat frustratingly, Rosamund keeps her pregnancy a secret from her daughter Octavia’s father, even after Octavia is born. She’s like a strange English Virgin Mary who studies Elizabethan sonnets and really doesn’t want to “put anyone out”.

Her story also offers an interesting glimpse into class issues in 1960s London and the way that experiences of pregnancy and motherhood can both transcend and accentuate class divisions.

A few years ago, I spent a week in the hospital recovering from surgery. When my husband came to visit, I would fill his ears with tragic and/or hilarious tales of my ward-mates. He kept saying, “Write it down. This is novel material.” He was right. But I didn’t. 

Looks like Elaine Feeney did. Her novel, mostly set in a hospital ward, is uproariously funny as well as deeply sad and very wise. 

I grew up near Elaine’s home town in east Galway. So, though I don’t know her, I do know the society she is writing about. And she gets it spot on!

My husband (who is a woodturner) convenes a writing group for people who write about craft. I think that group should read this novel, set in a seventh-century monastic community, pretty well on a very large rock (Skellig Michael), for its detailed accounts of living on next to nothing and yet engaging, almost unaware, in meticulous daily craftsmanship. 

That isn’t what the book is about, exactly: it’s mostly about an extreme and obsessively self-denying way of life; it’s about how even a tiny handful of men fall into master and underling roles; it’s about how fear of the unknown leads to the creation of monsters in people’s minds, which in turn leads to tragedy. A hard book, in many senses. But amazing. 

Let’s be clear: the title is ironic. This is a love story, told mostly in retrospect. Well, it’s not love exactly. It’s sex. Or a kind of twisted idea of romance. It’s attraction anyway, not quite obsessive, but close.  And it’s mysterious. Who are these people? How do they connect to each other? How do they know each other? Do they even like each other? Why/why not?

The answers, if readers can identify them, are not reassuring. And yet... I loved this book, read it twice, straight off. It’s partly the descriptions of the physical world – natural and constructed – always partial, never conclusive, that are so attractive to read. 

And it’s a very young book. Exhilarating. 

Theoretically for Young Adults (meaning older teenagers), this one is also for adults of any age. It’s about exclusion, anxiety, depression, suicide, all matters that have touched my own family with tragedy, 

Helena Close knows about mental illness and what it feels like, and she describes it in visceral detail. But she is a sharp and funny writer, and she takes no prisoners when it comes to the false assurances of a certain kind of charlatan ‘counsellor’. 

The heroine of this book seems set to drown in sorrow, but she learns, slowly and with help, how to swim up out of pain and fear towards the light. So uplifting!

Secrets and lies always keep me turning the pages and this book has those in spades.

I love that Fisher writes about the kind of women we all know. Her characters are truly relatable and the dilemma of whether Maggie should expose her husband’s lies or protect the people she loves is an agonising one.

There’s so much humour in Fisher’s writing. I love a book that brings out laughter and tears.