- Claire Keegan is a celebrated Irish writer. She has won numerous awards, and her previous novel Foster was named by The Times in the UK as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published this century.
- Her new novel, at 110 pages more a novella, is set in a small rural community in Ireland. The story is quite simple but it develops into a strikingly powerful moral tale of real weight.
- The year is 1985 in the depth of winter, and Bill Furlong is the local coal and timber merchant. His business is very successful, despite many other local businesses closing due to the difficult economic times. He's a hard worker, good to his staff, and popular in the town. He and his wife have five young daughters. They are devout Catholics.
- He had a difficult time as a child. He never knew his father, and his mother, impregnated at sixteen, died when he was twelve. He was reared by Mrs Wilson, a kind and considerate Protestant widow.
- He’s a loving and generous husband and father, and plans to enrol his daughters at the well regarded St Margaret’s high school.
- Adjacent to the school is the convent for nuns. They run a laundry operation for local hotels, restaurants and other businesses and households. What is unknown, but what Bill discovers one night as he delivers coal, and a young woman confides in him, is that young pregnant girls are housed there, and their babies sent away for adoption. The are treated brutally, scrubbing floors and working in the laundry all day. He is hesitant to bring the issue up with the Mother Superior, but he is profoundly disturbed by it, and the Mother suspects he knows too much. His daughters may find their future acceptance by the school in jeopardy.
- Bill's character and courage are tested.
- Keegan provides A Note on the Text at the end. She tells the horrendous story of the Magdalen laundries:
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