This Is Happiness

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 parish of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity - it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling outside his grandparents' house in the first instants of the departed rain 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 fallings in and out of love, and the endlessly procrastinated coming of the electricity - a threshold that, once crossed, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.

Niall Williams' 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. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, 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.