![]() ![]() One day he discovers a student locked in the convent coal shed. “Some said that the training school girls, as they were known, weren’t students of anything, but were girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night.” “There was other talk, too, about the place,” Keegan writes. He has begun to doubt the real purpose of the nun’s “training school” (based on the notoriously exploitative Magdalene Laundries). We watch Furlong delivering coal to customers and giving free wood to neighbors who can’t afford coal, creaming a pound of butter and sugar for the family Christmas cake, treating his men to a holiday restaurant meal, buying Christmas gifts for his family, all the while trying to drift above the scrim of haunting secrecy about the identity of his birth father and a recent disturbing visit to the local convent. ![]() ![]() ‘Aren’t we the lucky ones?’ he remarked to Eileen in bed one night. “Sometimes Furlong, seeing the girls going through the small things which needed to be done - genuflecting in the chapel or thanking a shopkeeper for the change - felt a deep, private joy that these children were his own.” Her deceptively simple language is pitch-perfect: Keegan’s precisely considered details about character, setting, memory, and dramatic moment create a story you will want to read again and again. ![]()
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