I thought I had read Claire Keegan before but seemingly not. This was good but it’s more of a novella than a novel and left me with the feeling of ‘yes, but then what?’ wanting more of the story. There’s the odd book out there that I feel goes on too long but mostly it’s the short ones that annoy me.

Bill Furlong is a coal merchant somewhere in Ireland and this story happens in 1985. That makes me much the same age as the Bill’s teenage daughters and I remember all the things that they talk about here, but simultaneously this seems, to me, to be a story from a much earlier era. That’s kind of the point though. The Magdalene laundries were Catholic church condoned workhouses for wayward teenage girls and they were still going long after you’d have thought they would have been. In the end it wasn’t the juxtaposition between myself and Bill’s daughters that seemed a bit weird but the comparison to the girls at the laundry which seemed utterly chilling.

But this felt like a prologue and I was left wondering what happened next.