There is a fortuitous irony in the title of Claire Keegan’s new novel, currently much discussed as the shortest book (at a mere 116 pages) ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The previous record was held by Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, but this year’s selection, which includes Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker (more pages but fewer words), is sure to revive the old debate about what makes a novel a novel, as distinct from a long short story or a novella. Certainly, Keegan’s offering is brief, and it lacks ‘an entwined plot with many strands slowly being skeined out’ (to quote a choice phrase of the literary historian Francis O’Gorman), but we do better, when judging a literary work, to consider its weight over its page count. Small Things Like These may be a short novel but it is by no means small – and what gives the book its weight is its combination of clear, precise prose and a suspenseful plot built around a premise that should stand as the keystone of any Christian society, a premise neatly expressed in the Gospel of Luke: ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.’

The central character of Small Things Like These, a man named Bill Furlong, lives in Catholic Ireland in the second half of the 20th century (we meet him during the run-up to Christmas 1985), a place as nominally Christian as it is possible to be. Born illegitimate, he was fortunate enough to be taken in by a kindly Protestant widow, rising ‘from nothing’ to relative success as a coal and timber merchant in the County Wexford town of New Ross. In most respects, he is an ordinary, decent man, as good a husband and father as he can be, industrious and considerate of the men who work for him, but he is all too aware of the fact that his life is an endless round of ‘getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again’. In the course of those day-long delivery rounds, he is haunted by confused childhood memories and questions about the identity of his father – and this drives him to ask questions about things that other people, his wife Eileen in particular, would rather not confront. Part of him craves change, a turn of events where things might ‘develop into something else, or new’, but he has no idea how this change might happen and, to begin with at least, he seems incapable of instigating it himself.

His life does begin to change, however, during a routine delivery to the Good Shepherd convent, where the nuns run a training school for girls and a high-end laundry business. The introduction of the word ‘laundry’ in this context will come as a red flag to many readers. (Keegan’s note on the Magdalene Laundries scandal at the end of the book is brief but powerful: ‘It is not known’, she writes, ‘how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate.’) For decades most have turned a blind eye to the nuns’ crimes, and the people of New Ross, whether from complacency or fear of the Church’s power, are no different (one character remarks, ‘you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie’). It would be wrong to disclose more of the plot here, but it should be said that the novel’s treatment of an urgent and apparently unfathomable moral question, one that for Furlong is bound up with his psychological history, is persuasive and obliges the reader to interrogate the nature of common decency.

In its wintry depiction of New Ross, Small Things Like These provides a rich evocation of a specific place and season, and the writing is spellbinding; nevertheless, it is the account of a life-changing Christmas in the life of one man that makes it such a compelling read. Keegan raises complex questions, not only around the book’s central premise but also about what we can know for sure in a duplicitous society. For a long time, Furlong himself is unsure of what he can fairly make of what he has witnessed or of what his neighbours say: ‘People said lots of things – and a good half of what was said could not be believed; never was there any shortage of idle minds or gossips about town.’ Overworked, fearful of losing what little prosperity he has achieved and surrounded by misinformation, this ordinary man is driven as much by his own ghosts as by a sincere desire to do the right thing. What he would like is what most of us would probably choose: family, security and the occasional self-indulgence. However, faced with great wrong, Bill Furlong must forego the unexamined life and accept the dangerous burden of being fully human.