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In Kiltumper Spiral-Bound | 2021-08-31

Niall Williams Christine Breen

$28.39 - Free Shipping
From the author of This Is Happiness, a memoir of life in rural Ireland and a meditation on the power, beauty, and importance of the natural world.

35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, raising two children, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.
In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month-by-month through the year, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendors and a couple who have made their life making, and observing, its wonders.

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket
Pages: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 1635577187
Item Weight: 1.2 lbs
Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.0 x 9.6 inches
"Heartbreaking… uplifting… it has been a delight to step out of this city and into Niall and Chris's precious garden, into the rhythms of their way of living, and to be refreshed." --Tim Pears, author of The Horseman
"What makes this book so remarkable isn't just the quality of the prose, which at times almost made me gasp with its insights into the unique rhythms of Irish life, which it conjures so effortlessly, but also the sense of an ending, a running out of road somewhere up ahead that need not always be dwelled upon." --Irish Central
"Graceful, evocative . . . A warm homage to a piece of beloved Irish land." --Kirkus Reviews

for This Is Happiness:
"A book so beautiful and so funny and so true that it will make you love the whole human race and forgive it all its trespasses." --The New York Times Book Review
"This elegiac novel is as unhurried as its setting . . . The novel's description of a lost rural lifestyle, and the gaps between a young man's romantic expectations and the inescapable letdown of reality, is comic and poignant in equal measure." --The New Yorker
"[An] often delightful rural rhapsody." --The Wall Street Journal

Niall Williams is the author of ten novels, including This Is Happiness, named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and Real Simple, History of the Rain, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Four Letters of Love, for which he has recently completed the screenplay. Christine Breen is the author of Her Name Is Rose, So Many Miles to Paradise, and, with Niall, the coauthor of four nonfiction books on country living in Ireland. Together, they live in Kiltumper in County Clare, Ireland.