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

Macy HB

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

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.

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. 

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.

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.

There are many consolations in having a convulsed heart.

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.

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

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

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

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