Read it on Christmas Eve. Obviously.

Keegan writes a paragraph the way most people write a page, and I say that having spent a fortnight resisting the general enthusiasm, because when everybody agrees about a writer I get suspicious and then I get late.

Bill Furlong delivers coal and timber in a small Irish town in 1985. Five daughters, a decent marriage, a business that just about works, a childhood he has chosen not to examine. He sees something at the convent — something he isn't supposed to see. The whole book is a man deciding whether to carry on not examining things.

The restraint is the pleasure of it. Nobody makes a speech. Nobody names the laundries. The town's complicity is entirely in what people decline to say to him: the shopkeeper's warning wrapped inside a pleasantry, his wife's practical terror, the advice about keeping the wrong people onside. Keegan trusts you to know the history and refuses to explain it, right for an Irish reader and slightly punishing for everybody else. If you don't know what a Magdalene laundry was, look it up before you start, because the book will not tell you.

Where I'd push back: it stops at exactly the moment the consequences begin. Beautifully judged, and also a way of not having to write the difficult part.

Eight. It was shortlisted in a year when the fashion was for very short novels, and I rather wish it hadn't been, because the prize chatter turned a quiet book into a talking point about word counts.