Niall Williams

Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical FictionThe most enchanting novel you'll read this year, from the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times 'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha; a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain. But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it comes a lodger to Noel's home, Christy McMahon. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As Noel navigates his coming-of-age by Christy's side, falling in and out of love, Christy's buried past gradually comes to light, casting a glow on a small world and making it new.

This Is Happiness

A profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing.You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now--just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity--it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents' house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy's long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel's own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity--a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.Niall Williams's latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.

Macy HB

You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for.

I felt the loss of him even before he had gone. Which is, I suppose, as good as any a description of love.

In those days, time still retained elasticity and so you didn’t run to the phone. It would ring until you got there. 

The evenings that fell then were like embroidered cloths, warm and blue before the stars came out, a living embodiment of the soft permissive comfort in the sound May. Say it and you sound the evening coming down over Faha and the fields about, the cattle standing in them and the river behind the street wearing the navy sky like a favored scarf. May. A sound that comes around you. A sound that has your mother in it.

There are many consolations in having a convulsed heart.

In the days that followed, Christy went to work, and I stayed in and around the house, lost to the dream-blank of the bereft and the mute mope of a heart given away. Because I was incapable of inventing a unique behaviour, or the world had used up all its originality, with a sugared irresistibility, all the clichés of lovelorn behaviour stuck to me. I didn’t mind. There’s honor in the ghost-company of the unrequited.

Faha fast and not so fast asleep was a thing tender and serene, the twist of the village street like a child’s drawing, innocent of history and again, every shop suspended, every house shut-eyed and blind and huddled to its near neighbour, the church august and grey and grave like a watchman.

Because there was no electric light, because we were at one of the edges of the universe, and because they were usually shielded with an impenetrable cloud, the stars hung with naked wonder. You could hardly credit it was the same world you were in yesterday. 

All that had stitched me into this life came undone, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.

Someone has said religion lasted longer in Ireland because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell.

Lindyll Steyn

This was a tough one to rate. The writing is beautiful, characters well developed…yet found myself bored and forcing my way through various parts of the novel.

Sarah Erle

Fraser Simons

This holds a sublime voice. The type of book you can point to when people go on about “overwriting”, and at any given point in a page show how editing down the prose would absolutely be cutting the legs off of the character work put into the winding, evocative sentences. 

The plot is a simple kind of recounting and therefor preservation, of an Ireland long past. One of my favourite sequences is when the town is to be fitted with electricity for the first time and the man set to do the job wanders each dwelling, mumbling about how difficult a job it would be. Ranging from bit of a problem to small miracle. Suppose you’ll be wanting a light in here, of all places!? (The living room). If you wouldn’t mind. Grumble grumble grumble. 

It meanders in a coming-of-age way, but also, almost, cradle-to-grave. Marinating in the absolutes of his memory, high highs and low lows. And in all of it is a portrait of the land and people and community well rendered from each simulacrum. There is a bit of a through line, but not something remotely driven by plot. It’s quintessentially Irish in its telling of a life. It’s close to a 5 star read for me, but it doesn’t feel decisive enough in the end to reach that quite a height, for me.

Cindy Lieberman

A beautifully written, poignant story about growing up in a small town in Ireland around the time that electricity reached the locals. Settle in with a large pot of tea for this one.

Megan McMorran

This is a story told by a man in his 70s looking back on his experience as a young man in a small remote Irish community, a community who seems to be the last in the western world to get electricity. Getting electricity is the plot; the rest is all about the eccentric cast of characters who have their own take on Irish rueful, stoicism: no matter how bad or how sad things get, a certain inscrutable persistence prevails. But this is a brutal reduction; the author’s eloquence, his wit and wise compassion leave a lasting impression. For me the book was best read in snippets to take in the full effect. 

Karen Shimek

The prose is five stars, and the plot is three stars. It was so beautifully written, yet I found myself putting it down a lot.

This Is Happiness

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