Small Things Like These

Furlong looked at the framed photographs of Eileen’s family up there, of her mother and father and several others belonging to her, and the little ornaments she liked to collect which somehow looked cheap to him, having grown up in a house with finer, plainer things. During busy times like these, Furlong made most of the deliveries himself, leaving the yardmen to bag up the next orders and cut and split the loads of felled trees the farmers brought in. Those were put in there because they hadn’t a soul in this world to care for them. Foster was named by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century.