Some works of literature seem to astonish and devastate at the same time. So it is with Irish writer CLAIRE KEEGAN’s most recent novel, Small Things Like These, a New York Times and Oprah Book Club Choice 2024, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and voted by readers of The Irish Times this year as the best book of the 21st century. In restrained and luminous prose, Keegan tells the story of a coal merchant in a small Irish town who makes a discovery that forces him to face his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. In conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author ANDREA ELLIOTT, Keegan will discuss the novel and her writing.