This Is Happiness

Niall Williams (Author)

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Description

Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

The most enchanting novel you'll read this year, from the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain

Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a thousand years.

For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets for which he needs to atone. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community – its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs – and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.

Product details

Published	05 Sep 2019
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	400
ISBN	9781526609335
Imprint	Bloomsbury Publishing
Dimensions	234 x 153 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Niall Williams

Niall Williams was born in Dublin in 1958. His cri…

Admirers of Niall Williams's Booker-longlisted History of the Rain will not be disappointed to learn that his latest novel is possibly even better … What makes this so compelling and enjoyable is Williams's transparent love of his characters and delight in his setting

Alexander Larman, Observer
Charming is one word for Williams' prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page. I suggest we all buy his books, pushing him into that realm of globally fashionable Irish writers, but more importantly, sharing with a vast audience his humane and poetic world view

Isabel Berwick, Financial Times
Williams has the eye of a poet and the raconteur's knack for finding a tale in the most unpromising nook of everyday life, as a now-adult Noel, summoning the Faha of his nostalgic imagination, narrates an elegiac novel that's careful always to offset the antic rural eccentricity with darker notes of loss

Daily Mail
This is Happiness returns to the beguiling gloom of Faha … [A] wise and redemptive novel … It dares, in addition, to be wildly comic … With his silver ear for speech and extreme attentiveness to the Heaneyesque “music of everyday”, Mr Williams treads softly on the dreams of youth and memories of old age

Caroline Jackson, Country Life
Lovingly written, the text is brimming with humanity, truth and humour – and then there's the pitch perfect language, with not a word out of place … Magnificent

Sue Leonard, Irish Examiner
Sharp as a tack, bright as a button, and engorged with rich humour, this is a love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone

Irish Independent