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 ... Read moreand 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
A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale
Praise for 'History of the Rain'
Guardian
Extremely moving, poignantly capturing Ruth’s doomed childhood relationship with her twin brother. By the final chapter I was weeping
Praise for 'History of the Rain'
Sunday Times
Deeply allusive, infectiously hopeful … Somewhere between bildungsroman, epic and family saga, History of the Rain is an unashamedly unfashionable, lyrical paean to the pleasure of reading and to serendipity
Praise for 'History of the Rain'
Daily Telegraph
A delicate and graceful love story that is also an exaltation of love itself . . . A luminously written, magical work of fiction
Praise for 'Four Letters of Love'
New York Times Book Review
A book that I am rereading in an attempt to figure out the magic and calm my soul
Kate DiCamillo
New York Times Book Review
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