This Is Happiness Spiral-Bound | 2019-12-03
Niall Williams
★★★★☆+ from 10,001 to 50,000 ratings
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 village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now—just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity—it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents’ house shortly after the rain has stopped 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 experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity—a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.
Niall Williams’s 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. 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.
"This big-hearted story is an intimate study of a small place on the brink of change." --New York Times
"An often delightful, rural rhapsody." --Wall Street Journal
"A charming, often moving book, enriched by beautifully drawn characters and brilliantly depicted scenes from country life." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"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." --Ron Charles, Washington Post
"The beauty and power of Irish author Niall Williams' writing lies in his ability to invest the quotidian with wonder. A truly peerless wordsmith, he even makes descriptions of gleaming white appliances and telephone wire sing…the book is hilarious among its many other virtues. Buy, rent, get your hands on this book somehow and savor every word of it. Its title says it all: Plunging into This is Happiness is happiness indeed." --BookPage, starred review
"Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity. A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"With a beckoning gentleness that belies the deeper philosophies at play, superb Irish author Williams (History of the Rain, 2014) offers a lilting, magical homage to time and redemption, and a stirring, sentimental journey into the mysteries of love and the possibilities of friendship." --Booklist, starred review
"Glorious and lyrical prose . . . This novel is a delight." --Publishers Weekly
"A kind of tectonic movement from spring into summer, marked by the rhythms of village life . . . He has a humorist's eye, and his own fond amusement at the people he writes about shines out through the writing." --The Guardian
"This Is Happiness is resplendent with metaphor. It speaks to the vital role friendship and a tight-knit community can play in strengthening the human spirit." --Shelf Awareness