I am such a fan of Niall Williams.” —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of TOM LAKE
“On the surface, Time of the Child by Niall Williams is an elegiac portrait of life in an Irish village in the Christmas season of 1962. But it is so much more than that. Somehow, by laying bare the inner lives of these decent country people, my own life feels so much richer for having read it. I was deeply moved by this novel.” —Mary Beth Keane, New York Times Bestselling Author of ASK AGAIN, YES and THE HALF MOON
“A powerful pleasure to find myself back in Faha where the prose is luminous, the people irresistible, the stories mesmerizing, and it never stops raining.” —Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Booth
“Oh, the utter goosebumpy pleasure of reading this book! The experience will fill you up, even if you didn't know there was an emptiness there to begin with. Niall Williams reminds us again and again that the small and the ordinary are married to amazement, that dailiness and miracles walk hand in hand, and that other people are a mystery: Approach with curiosity! Approach with grace.” —Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS and SANDWICH
“With writing so stunning, Time of The Child forces the reader to turn down page after page to always remember what genius is. Another glorious and touching novel from Niall Williams, one of the world's greatest storytellers.” —Anne Griffin, internationally bestselling author of WHEN ALL IS SAID
“There is so much to admire in Niall Williams new novel-the lyrical language, how landscape and destiny intertwine, the complex bonds of community-but what impresses most is how vividly he enters the innermost thoughts of his characters, thus revealing their seemingly quiet existences brim with the profoundest questionings of how we should live our lives. Time of the Child is a triumph.” —Ron Rash, author of SERENA and THE CARETAKER
“Niall Williams is one of Ireland's greatest storytellers, and Time of the Child is his finest, and most compelling work to date.” —Simon Van Booy, author of SIPSWORTH
“A Christmas miracle lies at the heart of this tender offering . . . Williams works up to the miraculous event with steady pacing, breathing life into the characters and crafting a memorable sense of place. For those looking to get into the holiday spirit, this is just the ticket.” —Publishers Weekly
“Comic and poignant in equal measure.” —The New Yorker on THIS IS HAPPINESS
“Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. Halfway through, I realized that if I didn't stop underlining passages, the whole book would be underlined . . . Williams is engaged in the careful labor of teaching us to hear the subtler melodies drowned out by the din of modern life . . . This is a story about the beginnings of love and the persistence of affection, about the loss of faith and the recovering of belief. If you're a reader of a certain frame of mind, craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare wisdom, this, truly, is happiness.” —Washington Post, "50 Notable Works of Fiction" on THIS IS HAPPINESS
“This big-hearted story is an intimate study of a small place on the brink of change.” —New York Times on THIS IS HAPPINESS
“Williams . . . is a master of Irish storytelling, crafting sentences that tempt the reader to double back and read again - and characters that get under your skin.” —The Associated Press
“Exploring possibility with a generous and intimate spirit, Williams invokes an ode to love.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“The remote, rain-soaked village of Faha is to the brilliant Irish writer Niall Williams what Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner . . . Time of the Child is a Christmas tale of the very best sort, one that reminds us of the fundamental mystery of being human. Even in this sinking parish on the furthermost edge of nowhere, in the dark and dying time of the year, there's something in the air that speaks of the miraculous.” —California Review of Books
“An exquisite portrayal of everyday life in the rural west Ireland of 1962 . . . Akin to Dickens in his observations, Williams' descriptions of gesture hint at his characters' interior landscapes. Kind and funny, this needs a great film director.” —Woman & Home
★ 10/01/2024
Readers are welcomed back to Faha, the Irish village that featured so charmingly in Williams's previous novel, This Is Happiness. In this new work, it is now 1962, and Faha has entered the modern age, with the arrival of electricity and telephones. Another arrival, just before Christmas, is an abandoned baby, discovered by young Jude Quinlan at the back gate of the church. With the help of two bachelor brothers, Jude takes the baby to the home of the village doctor. Dr. Troy lives with his daughter Ronnie, who helps him nurse the frozen baby back to health. As a result, the baby quickly becomes attached to Ronnie. Over the next few days, the doctor hatches a scheme that would allow his unmarried daughter to keep and raise the baby (unlikely to be otherwise permitted in ultra-Catholic Ireland). Conspiring with the doctor to keep the baby a secret before the authorities come calling are Jude and the two brothers. Doady and Ganga, making a return appearance from This Is Happiness, also play an unwitting part in this plan. VERDICT With its elegant plot, endearing characters and subtle humor, this is a lovely Christmas miracle of a book.—Barbara Love
★ 2024-08-03
In a small Irish town, the local doctor deals with the very young, the very old, and the possibility that he’s ruined his daughter’s life.
“To those who lived there, Faha was perhaps the last place on earth to expect a miracle. It had neither the history nor the geography for it. The history was remarkable for the one fact upon which all commentators agreed:nothing happened here.” Well, they are wrong about that. This sequel to Williams’ much-lovedThis Is Happiness (2019) is set in the same town several years later: Christmas season 1962, a period when small-town machinations of all kinds come to a head. These are presented in Williams’ signature prose style: sinuous sentences that may seem at first a bit hard to follow but in short order reveal themselves to be full of music, humor, and insight. Like the work of writers from James Joyce to Anna Burns, Williams’ novel is one of those books that teach you how to read it, ultimately staking out its own linguistic territory in your brain. As for the idea that “nothing happens here”—nothing except that 12-year-old Jude Quinlan finds an abandoned and possibly dead baby in a courtyard; the assistant priest is scheming furiously to replace his geriatric superior, who keeps wandering off, both physically and mentally; and Dr. Jack Troy, healer, brains, and backbone of Faha, fears he has made a terrible mistake. His oldest daughter, 29-year-old Ronnie, who after her mother’s death and the departure of two younger sisters still keeps house for her father and helps him run his practice, was courted by a young man named Noel Crowe. Troy shut down the relationship, thinking the boy unsuitable, but now gleans that Ronnie has been inquiring about Crowe, apparently crushed to learn he’s emigrated to the U.S. Overcome with remorse, the good doctor cooks up a daring if cockamamie plan. One need not have read the first installment to enjoy the second; reading them in the opposite order is just as good.
Treat yourself to this.
