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Colm Toibin, one of my favorite writers, called ‘Small Things Like These’ by Claire Keegan the best novel he read in the year it was published. The book was shortlisted for the booker prize in 2022. Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2024. The book is short, at just a little over a hundred pages, but packs a punch. Even Oprah, in one of the videos on the book club’s Instagram page, says you’ll be thinking about it long after you’ve turned the final page.

The book is dedicated to the women and children forced to work at the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Built to house women who had ‘fallen from grace’ but promoted cheap labor, Magdalene Laundries were stricter than prisons. Women had to work without pay and were only provided a meager meal at best. Their living conditions were horrifying, with many being forced to eat off the floor or sleep in dank places. In Ireland, the last Magdalene Laundry ceased operating only in 1996.

Set in Ireland in 1985, Small Things Like These follows Bill Furlong, a coal and timber delivery man, as he makes a shocking discovery that will change the course of his life. He’s living a content life with his wife and daughters when he stumbles upon something that involves the church. Bill doesn’t know how to deal with it and despite his wife’s insistence that he look the other way, he can’t help but get involved in it. The book is alternately slow and fast. What I mean by that is there’s a leisurely pace to life in the book but things unravel quickly once Bill discovers the town’s well-kept secret. 

Bill’s life hasn’t been easy. He doesn’t know who his father is and his mother dies when he’s just a child. But all his life he has been shown kindness by strangers who took him in and nurtured him. In a way, he’s come to associate love with kindness. Isn’t what you know of love and how you perceive love shaped by how you were loved while growing up? Bill has received kindness and it’s the only way he knows how to be. This dictates his actions and he can’t turn away when he feels someone needs his help. This might mean giving beggars all the change in his pockets or rescuing someone in trouble.

Despite the brevity, you feel like you really get to know the characters. I can’t fathom how Keegan has been able to achieve that but you come to care about the people in the story. Perhaps that is because Keegan taps into their vulnerabilities and shows you it’s possible to maintain grace under pressure. Bill is a man with a clear conscience and he does his best to live by certain principles. He’s a good husband and a caring father. When things go wrong, he doesn’t buckle. His goodness forces him to stand his ground and do what he thinks is right despite knowing it might be a hard battle. 

I read Small Things Like These in under two hours. It was so engrossing that I wasn’t able to put it down. It’s sad, horrifying, and strangely uplifting at the same time. It shows you what humans are capable of and that cruelty and kindness co-exist in the world and that it’s never one or the other but a mix of both. This is a book you’ll want to buy a few copies of, one to keep and the others to give to family and friends.

About the author

Claire Keegan is an Irish author who is known for her short stories and novellas. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Paris Review among others. Two of her novellas have been made into movies. Small Things Like These has been adapted into a film starring Cilian Murphy and Emily Watson. She has received several awards including The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The Martin Healy Prize, and The Olive Cook award.

Fiction

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

Published: 2021

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Pages: 110, Paperback

If I see a book of short stories by an author I haven’t read, I will definitely buy it. I won’t even have to read the blurb to decide. I just know I will enjoy it. And I’ve hardly ever been wrong. Even if I don’t like all the stories in a particular collection, I will enjoy a few and that will be enough for me to recommend the book to others. The same goes for my recent read ‘Dead-End Memories’ by Banana Yoshimoto. The book has five stories and I more or less like them all. 

Translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, the writing was refreshing. Perhaps it was because I had never read both the author and the translator before. But I enjoyed every bit of it. The stories were beautiful and nostalgic. I could see me and my friends in the characters. All the stories are about women who, after some painful events in their lives, find comfort in small moments of everyday life. 

I was intrigued by the author’s name and I found out that Banana Yoshimoto is the pen name of the author Mahoko Yoshimoto whose father is a famous poet in Japan. She is the prize winning and internationally bestselling author of many works of fiction like ‘Kitchen’, ‘Asleep’ and ‘The Premonition’. In Dead-End Memories, Yoshimoto delves into the lives of women who are grappling with some sort of a transition in their lives. There’s a melancholic undertone to the stories but there’s a fair bit of drama too to keep things interesting. 

The women in the stories discover their strengths and weaknesses through varied experiences in their lives. A woman’s romantic life is shaped by the ghosts of a couple who live in the house of her lover. A hard-working editor has a near death experience that completely changes the course of her life—She’s poisoned at work and that changes her relationship with work and her co-workers. Though the stories involve romance, they aren’t centered on it. There’s also a recurring theme of food in the stories despite the stories never overlapping. It made me realize how much of our memories are shaped by the smell and taste of what we eat. 

Despite being short, I found myself taking time with the book as the themes are heavy, calling for a lot of reflection. They deal with abuse, rape, betrayals, and the end of a marriage. What I like about storytelling in shorter formats is that it leaves a lot of room for imagination and introspection. You can draw up your own conclusions and get many opportunities to question your own beliefs. Dead-End Memories is controlled storytelling. Yoshimoto doesn’t beat around the bush and gives you just the information you need to think about the story and their possible path or outcomes yourself. Some call her writing simple and superficial but I found it to be relatable and fun. I highly recommend this anthology. Read it, weep, smile, and think about some things and memories you have maybe long forgotten. 

Dead-End Memories

Banana Yoshimoto

Translated by Asa Yoneda

Published: 2024

Publisher: Faber & Faber Ltd.

Pages: 221, Paperback

Resolutions are overrated and perhaps destined to fail because of just how overly ambitious they are. This year, me and a few of my friends—comprising a medical doctor, a psychologist who has been practicing for five years, and an engineer who quit her job last year and runs her own business now—decided to list down some things we’d like to do in 2025.

We have always made shared resolutions but this year we decided to deviate from the usual routine and call them mindful habits. We’re also going to take it slow and not give up on a habit even if we fail a few times. I’ve asked for permission to share our list of habits or changes we’d like to make this year to inspire you all to maybe pick one or two to incorporate in your life or make a list of your own. Here are our top five things that we are going to follow in 2025 for a more disciplined and healthy lifestyle.

Meditate daily, even if for just 10 minutes

A couple of years ago, I took up yoga and meditation. I joined an online class and started doing an hour of it every day. The changes in me weren’t immediate but over time, people started commenting that I was calmer and happier. I had actually felt the changes in me before others noticed. I wouldn’t get upset over small things and was able to let things go without creating a fuss. Then after six months, the classes got over and I didn’t rejoin. I thought I could carry on without guidance. But then I started becoming erratic with my practice. This year, we’re planning to restart mediation and do 10 minutes to begin with. We will build up from there. Our aim is to make a habit to meditate for at least 30 minutes daily in the next six months.

Spend time outdoors

Exposure to morning sunlight is important to set the tone of the day. It’s also a good thing to do to get your daily dose of Vitamin D which is crucial for bone, muscle, and nerve health. All of us spend most of our time indoors, at work or at home, so we have decided to spend at least 10 to 15 minutes out in the sun as soon as we wake up. It could be while drinking a cup of tea or reading the papers. But this one is non-negotiable and it shouldn’t be that hard since all we have to do is open the door, step out into our balcony or garden area, and just bask in the sun. Alternatively, we have also decided to try to go out for short walks, mid-work, or spend some time in nature after we reach home.

Eat meat on the weekends

All of us agreed that we’d like to eat less meat this year. Many studies have shown that meat, especially processed meat, isn’t the healthiest thing for your body. We contemplated becoming a vegetarian for a year before deciding it would be too much too soon. So to take it slow and ease ourselves into it, we’ve decided to eat meat on the weekend and stick to a plant-based diet on the weekdays. This seems more doable than going vegetarian. This way we get to satisfy our non-veg cravings and we also have to experiment with our food, since we have to start eating all kinds of vegetables  and grains to compensate for the meat.

Sugar control 

Not eating sugar isn’t possible for us but for those who think they can do it, it’s one of the best gifts they can give themselves. Sugar is responsible for inflammation in the body which leads to many health issues, especially in the long run. Cutting down on sugar can help you lose weight, keep your blood pressure in check, and also prevent a lot of chronic diseases. We’ve all tried to stop eating sugar in the past and we’ve all failed miserably. So in 2025, our goal is to cut down on sugar and be mindful of what we are eating. We’re going to eat chocolates, but not every day. We’re going to have a slice of cake but we’ll stick to having it once a week at the most. The idea is to have as little sugar as possible while ensuring we don’t abstain from it altogether. This way, we believe, we will be able to give up sugar completely in the future.

Keeping our word

Oftentimes, we say we will do something and forget about it or we make promises knowing that we might not be able to keep it. We say yes when we want to say no. This sometimes has us doing things we wouldn’t have been involved in if we hadn’t said yes without thinking or if we had had the presence of mind to think things through. One of the things I’d personally like to change in 2025 is being able to keep my word. My friends agreed that if we all made promises we could keep, we’d feel better about ourselves and our reputations, at work and on a personal front, would also be so much better.

Shirley Jackson, who was born in San Francisco in 1916, was famous because of her short story ‘The Lottery’ which was published in The New Yorker in 1948. Readers were scandalized and sent her hate mail. But it didn’t stop her from writing and getting published. Her first novel, ‘The Road Through the Wall’ was published in the same year. ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ brought her more fame and went on to become all time classics.

She was mostly known for her horror stories but she also published two memoirs of life in Vermont where she lived with her husband and four children. For a writer who died in her sleep when she was 48, Jackson left behind a wide body of work. Two collections of her essays and other writing were even published posthumously.

I had only read Jackson’s famous short story and the novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I was actually looking for The Haunting of Hill House when I came across 

‘Life Among the Savages’. The blurb was intriguing, starting with: “Sometimes, in my capacity as a mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children.” I bought the book without even opening the plastic cover to check the size of the font, which I usually do. There was no way I wasn’t reading this masterpiece. The font could be horrible and minuscule for all I cared.

It turned out to be a great read. The font size was perfect too, in the Penguin edition (published by Penguin Classics in 2019). I was captivated by Jackson’s life and her ability to navigate the complexities of marriage and motherhood with an ease that I have never come across. The language is also quite compelling and she doesn’t seem to sugarcoat things, preferring to keep it raw and real. She also doesn’t try to portray her husband, children and even herself in a positive light. She is simply stating the facts and how things are. It’s refreshing, at times funny, and quite relatable, even though the setting is of an entirely different time as compared to today.

The book starts off with Jackson’s family having to look for a new place to stay. Their lease is up and they are asked to move. Their finances aren’t that great and they have two small children to look after. After being shown expensive houses that are all up for sale, they finally settle on renting an old dilapidated mansion of sorts. The rent is cheap, at $50 a month, and the owner even makes a few renovations for them. The family moves and it means a lot of adjustments and modifications.

Life Among the Savages is basically a story of the domestic mundanities that set in when you have to manage a family, your finances, and various other daily activities. Jackson keeps her tone casual but there’s a looming sense of frustration. The book was apparently initially published as a series of stories in various women’s magazines and later put together in a single collection. But it doesn’t read like disjointed writings. There’s a smooth flow to it that makes you ponder about life and how some things never change.

I believe every woman must read this brilliant depiction of domestic life. It will perhaps help us understand how we can navigate our own lives better at a time when our professional lives are starting to overwhelm us, and slow living is the last thing on our minds. But men should also pick this one up because it tells you things women might not always spell out for you by giving you a glimpse of how society can set unrealistic expectations on women and how it can be burdensome.

Life Among the Savages

Shirley Jackson

Published: 1953

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Young

Pages: 229, Paperback

Ruth Reichl has written nine books including ‘The Paris Novel’ and edited many others like ‘History in a Glass’ and ‘Endless Feasts’. Most of her books revolve around food and culture that celebrate food. The cover of The Paris Novel has Nigella Lawson, English food writer and television cook, calling it ‘nothing less than absolute enchantment’.

I was surprised I had never come across Reichl’s works or even heard of her. I read the blurb of The Paris Novel and the first few pages at the bookshop and decided to buy it. It seemed like a simple story filled with mentions of food, books, and life in Paris. It’s also not a thick book so I thought I would breeze through it in a couple of days.

Stella St. Vincent is a copy editor at a publishing house and she likes her structured life. Then she receives a mysterious note from her late mother telling her to go to Paris. Her mother, who Stella never had a loving relationship with, has instructed her attorney, and perhaps her lover at one point, to buy a one way plane ticket to Paris for Stella and convert the remaining money in her account to traveller’s checks.

When Stella’s boss finds her asleep at the office she tells her to take an extended leave. She promises Stella that her job will be waiting for her when she gets back. Left with no choice, Stella finds herself alone in Paris. She doesn’t have friends there and is a little lost and overwhelmed. Then she meets Jules, an octogenarian who collects art and sees something in Stella that makes him take her under his wing. He introduces her to a side of Paris (and life) that she has never seen before.

The Paris Novel is rich in imagery and full of Parisian vibes. The plot is predictable and cliched. Stella, initially a shy and insecure American woman, turns into a confident go-getter with a flamboyant attitude by the end of the book and you see it coming the moment she lands in Paris. The book could also remind you of the many coming-of-age novels you have read. But be warned, there’s a familiarity to it that might bore you. It’s like a fictional version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’—which is basically one woman’s quest of finding herself.

The writing, with all the references to French culture and cuisine, can also confuse you. It’s a novel that never picks up. Unlike what I initially thought, I couldn’t finish the book in a day or two. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. I had to take it slow as I was unfamiliar to the French lifestyle beyond what I’ve seen on the popular show ‘Emily in Paris’ on Netflix.

Whether or not you enjoy the novel depends on what kind of a read you are looking for. If you want an all vibes not much plot book, then this is for you. But if you are looking to follow a storyline, there isn’t much here. A friend who has read Reichl’s other works as well as The Paris Novel says the latter isn’t her best work and that I shouldn’t judge her based on it. She has recommended ‘Cheer Me Up with Apples’ and ‘Tender at the Bone’. Despite not being great, The Paris Novel, with its lush descriptions of food and wine, has whetted my appetite for more and I’m actually willing to give her another chance. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195430688-the-paris-novel 

The Paris Novel

Ruth Reichl

Published: 2024

Publisher: Magpie Books

Pages: 272, Paperback

Having read two out of three of Bollywood Actor Twinkle Khanna’s books—‘Mrs Funnybones’ and ‘Pyjamas are Forgiving’ and not having liked them very much, I was hesitant to read ‘Welcome to Paradise’, a collection of short stories published in 2023. I hadn’t read the one which came before that which was ‘The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad’ as I was convinced it wouldn’t be a good read.

Truth be told, I picked up Welcome to Paradise because it was on discount. The book was available at half price at Bookverse in Civil Mall, Kathmandu. “Why not? It’s a book of short stories and I can read one or two and give it to someone else to read if I don’t like it,” I thought to myself. But the first story ‘The Man from the Garage’ about a family who can’t decide if they want to cremate or bury their matriarch was highly nuanced and insightful. The characters felt like people I would bump into on the streets or at the temple. I was surprised by the fact that Khanna’s writing also seems to have improved a lot.

So, I kept reading. The stories that followed, and there are four more, were all snippets of lives that felt very real and addressed complex issues in a light-hearted manner. All the stories have women protagonists and are about middle-class life in Mumbai, India. The stories prove that Khanna is deeply observant as she has picked up a lot of tiny details that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. The stories are about loneliness, grief, and heartbreak and validate many of your emotions.

‘Let’s Pretend’, the second story in the collection, had me rooting for Amita as she pretends to be her aunt while corresponding with a man over email. ‘Jelly Sweets’, the story that comes at the very end, made me teary-eyed. It’s about how a mother copes with the loss of her son. The titular story ‘Welcome to Paradise’ was one that felt most real. What happens in Garima’s life could happen in anyone’s life. The story made me realize that sometimes experiences lend perspectives that don’t come from hearing or seeing other people’s stories and lives.

But my favorite one is ‘Nearly Departed’ about a woman named Madhura Desai, an 86-year-old retired teacher who wants to be able to end her life on her terms. She writes to the chief justice to seek permission for euthanasia as she suffers from Parkinson’s and doesn’t want to be dependent on anyone later in life. Her appeal goes viral and she gets a lot of media attention and requests for interviews, etc. I laughed, I got all choked up, and I reread it when I was done. I even asked a few friends to read this one, if not the rest of the stories in the collection, and they all loved it. They thought it was a fresh take on aging and how we all wish to be in control of our lives.

In the end, I didn’t give the book to anyone. It’s sitting on my bookshelf with story collections I have enjoyed in the past like ‘Her Body and Other Parties’ by Carmen Maria Machado and ‘The Lives of Strangers’ by Chitra Divakaruni among others. I have a feeling I might want to revisit the stories sometime in the future. And I will definitely be reading the next book Khanna writes and this time it won’t even need to be on discount. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200237485-welcome-to-paradise  

Welcome to Paradise

Twinkle Khanna

Published: 2023

Publisher: Juggernaut Books

Pages: 213, Paperback

Emma lives with her husband Leo and their daughter Ruby. She loves them and she’s happy. But everything her family knows about her is a lie. Even her name is fake. She can never tell them about her past. She knows she will lose them if she does as Leo won’t be able to deal with the betrayal, not after being betrayed by his parents. He’s never forgiven them for it.

But Leo is an obituary writer and Emma is a well-known marine biologist. When she is diagnosed with cancer, Leo tries to cope with it by reading and writing about her life. His editor also asks him to write a stock for Emma: Most papers write obituaries for famous people well in advance, and especially so if they are suffering from any illness. Leo agrees because he’s already started working on one and also because he thinks no one knows her like he does.

However, he stumbles upon some papers that don’t match with what she’s told him and it opens a can of worms. Leo starts questioning what he’s been told and Emma’s past and starts asking around as well. Soon, he finds out things that he doesn’t know about her, realizing that the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Emma will need to prove to Leo that she is the woman he always thought she was but for that she has to come clean about her past.

‘The Love of My Life’ was unlike anything I had ever read. It’s not a typical thriller but it keeps you on the edge. It’s gripping and heartbreaking at the same time. Rosie Walsh’s first book, ‘The Man Who Didn’t Call’ was a romance, suspense novel that was an instant bestseller when it came out. The novel’s theme was grief and it explored it in a subtle way that made you think. In The Love of My Life the theme is relationships and its complexities and again Walsh has done a brilliant job in exploring its nuances.

The story, like in The Man Who Didn’t Call, is told from two different perspectives. It keeps the narrative interesting by building the suspense gradually. Also, seeing things from two different viewpoints keeps your brain ticking. The only issue I had with the book was that while the story is full of twists and turns, it reads like a slow-burn family drama at times and less like a thriller. But all in all, I absolutely loved the story. The plot, I thought, was ingenious. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for something different to read.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58492104-the-love-of-my-life  

The Love of My Life

Rosie Walsh

Published: 2022

Publisher: Pan Books

Pages: 358, Paperback

Every home has its go-to meals. In Nepali households, it’s mostly ‘daal, bhaat, tarkari’, the occasional ‘roti, tarkari’, ‘khichdi’, and/or different forms of curries. We rarely deviate from this supposedly set menu, unless we have guests over or are eating out. I find home cooked meals comforting. I guess everyone does. But it can become mundane. We could all do with a little variety every now and then. This is where cookbooks come in handy. I have, over the past couple of years, amassed quite a collection of cookbooks. These, mostly hardcover, books are kept separately in a small shelf in the dining area. Looking at them makes me feel I’m able to prepare delicious, nourishing meals whenever I want to.

‘The Curry Guy Chicken’ by Dan Toombs and ‘Masala Memsahib’ by Karen Anand are two of my favorite cookbooks that I constantly reach for. These are mostly Asian/Indian recipes and as someone who likes a good curry and rice, I feel I don’t need anything else. But my family loves Nepali food. They find it easier to digest and more winter-friendly than oily, spices-heavy Indian food. I have come to realize that if you follow the recipes to the letter, it always comes out great. You are never disappointed. Earlier, I used to go with the flow, and what often happened was that I was never able to recreate a dish.

For Nepali cooking, I have for a while now turned to ‘Timmur’ by Prashanta Khanal. I first chanced upon the book at a dietician’s clinic. While waiting for my turn, I flipped through the pages and the full-page photos, taken by Nabin Baral and Gagan Thapa, caught my attention. The recipes are divided into sections, with a separate ‘Achaar’ segment as well. I left the clinic determined to buy my own copy the same day. I didn’t manage to, for various reasons. But the book was always at the back of my mind. Having tried my hands at making Indian curries and naans (through cookbooks, of course), I wanted to learn proper Nepali cooking too as much of what I knew was limited to what I had seen growing up.

I finally got a copy and it’s been a good investment. I’ve tried making many dishes and they have come out really well, so much so that my mother, who is an expert cook, complimented my cooking. As someone who grew up eating Nepali food, I was familiar with many of the recipes in the book but every time I made, say ‘kwati’ or Bamboo Shoot curry, it would taste different—I could never master the recipe. Timmur has made that possible for me. It has recipes for many of my childhood dishes, like ‘gundruk’, ‘aalu cauli tarkari’, and ‘khasiko bhutuwa’ among others, as well as many that I always wished I could make, like ‘yomari’ and ‘mula ko achaar’.

The thing about cookbooks is that they are easy to follow, unlike YouTube tutorials where you might lose track every few minutes and have to pause or rewind. Cookbooks also make for great coffee table books and can double as décor. I love having the one I’m using displayed on the kitchen counter or the dining table. Cookbooks, I believe, have made me a better cook, taught me some great hacks that have significantly lessened my time in the kitchen, as well as made me understand and appreciate different cuisines.