About Niall Williams

About Author Niall Williams

by Jackson Tejeda

I work in a bookstore. A small, quiet operation on a corner in San Francisco’s residential Potrero Hill. A few years ago, as I was tidying up before close, I came upon a paperback with the auspicious title The History of the Rain. That name reminded me of Nicole Krauss’s vaunted The History of Love (loved) and Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (hadn’t read, liked the name). The jacket design was of blue and green folds of water overlapping. I was interested in Irish novels. I flipped the book over and saw that it had gained some repute, long listed for 2014’s Man-Booker prize. I set the book down, and went back to tidying. Later, I bought it.

Niall Williams was born in Dublin, 1958. As a child, he read widely, making use of the Pembroke Library in Dublin. At eighteen, he published his first short story in The Irish Press. This early success signaled him to devote his life to writing. He studied literature, and moved to New York. He worked in publishing and eventually met his wife, the author Christine Breen. In 1985, they traded New York’s fast paced literary circles for the quiet countryside of County Clare, Ireland, where they have lived since.

Williams and Breen had worked in the book industry and were writing memoirs of their Irish life together. Williams had also written a few plays of his own. But the seed of a novel was growing in his head. It was this sentence: “When I was twelve years old God spoke to my father for the first time.” That was all he had. Eventually, a second sentence sprouted from the first: “God didn’t say much.” These words would germinate, blossoming into Niall’s first novel. It was 1997’s international bestseller, The Four Letters of Love.

Translated into over thirty different languages, this book put Niall Williams in bookstores, libraries, and newspapers around the world. Listing it as a notable book of the year, the New York Times described it as luminous and magical. Two years later, Williams’ second novel, As It is in Heaven was published to great acclaim. Following that came 2000’s The Way You Look Tonight. From his rural abode, he churned out novels once every year or two for the next two decades.

The History of Rain came to be in 2014. It was the first of his books set in the fictional town of Faha. Faha is a rural, out of the way place on the river Shannon in the West of Ireland. Loosely based on Williams and Breen’s real life home of forty years, it always rains there and anonymity is a foreign concept. The book follows Ruth Swain, a nineteen year old confined to bed with a serious illness. She reflects on her life and her town with its river and rain. She reads her way through her late father’s library, who was an unsound farmer, a dazzling poet, and a quiet, sensitive man. A bedridden narrator, looking at her past, not even two decades spent in a small Irish town. In a book where not much happens, therein lies a universe. I was taken.

I was already deep into a phase of Irish literature when it found me. During quarantine, I got really into Ulysses. In my defense I don’t think anyone can try to come to an understanding of Ulysses without “getting into it.” But in puttering through Joyce’s language and obscure references, I began to grow more interested in Irish literature. I felt the allure of any Irish book and read poetry, memoirs, history, and most of all novels. By the time The History of the Rain found its way into my hands, I was primed for Niall Williams.

Williams’ great trick is his pacing. Sometimes the rhetorical style is like the river Shannon itself. Timeless, meandering, and deeply moving. Something deceptively simple and natural, more captivating the longer one sits with it. And sometimes his style feels like you’re cozied in a little Irish cottage, hearing an old yarn by the fire. The plot dawdles into neighbors’ houses and lives with ease, without apparent reason. The brilliance and wit of his language is immediately apparent (In my journal I noted, “This would be a good book to read aloud, even just to yourself.”). And his language is charming. But the way the story slyly unfolds is more masterful. You don’t realize that it’s been gathering your heartstrings one by one, beat by beat. Something magisterial is building. Before you know it, the book reaches its thundering crescendo, and you’re in the thrall of the storyteller, utterly. The History of the Rain struck more than just a chord with me, it resonated with every heart string.

Jackson Tejeda holding Time of the Child by Author Niall Williams

I cherished it. I read it while walking places (like another young bookish Irish protagonist, Middle Sister from Anna Burns’ Milkman). I gave it as a gift to loved ones. I wrote an impassioned review on an index card for the bookstore, called a shelf talker in the book industry. I ordered piles of it to recommend to unsuspecting customers. Most books that I read, even those I love, I remember only for how they made me feel. The plot points, character names, and the rest of the content falls away. Usually, an emotional afterimage of my experience of a novel is all that sticks. But I remembered specific lines, and powerful images from The History of the Rain and still do. For a few months, the book lived in my chest. I had finished it, and I was still hungry for it.

I eventually reached out to Niall Williams to thank him for his work. The owner of the bookstore, Tee, had just read his more recent novel, This is Happiness (2019) and was recommending that one as well. I took a picture of the two books with their two shelf talkers and sent it to him. He responded cheerfully, and Niall and I have had an intermittent, cordial correspondence since. I would go on to read some more of his books, but not right away. I didn’t want to try and recreate my first experience. When I did read This Is Happiness, and later Four Letters of Love, I still found the same enchanting aspects to be present. A furtive plot, lilting language, and marvelous endings. And all of them, irresistibly Irish.

Time of the Child by Author Niall Williams

In November 2024, Niall’s most recent novel came out. The Time of the Child is a Christmas novel and the third of his Faha trilogy. It revisits some old characters and is familiarly heartwarming. Tee, my boss and a fellow Niall fan, and I shared an advanced reader’s copy, taking in the holiday title in mid July. The United Irish Cultural Center is thrilled to be hosting Niall on March 18, 2025.

 I for one am excited to meet him! Part two of my journey with Niall coming soon.

***

One of the wonderful aspects of working in a bookstore is my access to people in the book industry. I rarely reach out to authors after reading their work, but for Niall Williams I did. I have made it a goal to do this more, authors are only ever happy that I have. Most of the time it is just a tag on my bookstores instagram, when I post a review of the book. But sometimes it gets a bit more engagement.

As I mentioned, after reading History of the Rain, I eventually found myself ready to read This is Happiness. I didn’t want to replicate my experience of History of the Rain, but I still felt an obligation to try it out. And indeed, I loved it. I borrowed my boss’s hardcover copy. I plowed through it on a two day trip to the midwest. I finished the book while flying over California’s Central Valley, less than an hour from SFO. I didn’t have the same feeling of emotional implosion that I did when I finished History, but I was still moved by Niall’s charming turns of phrase, air of sentimentality, and Irish wit.

My boss, Tee, loved the book. Like most people that work in bookstores, she finds herself mired in book recommendations. Not only do we help people find the right books for themselves, but we also receive recs all day long. In a card to the famed author and bookstore owner Ann Patchett, my boss thanked her for writing her most recent novel, Tom Lake. In a true bookseller fashion, Tee couldn’t help herself from recommending the book. At this point the paperback of This is Happiness had been out for a few years. By happenstance, Ann Patchett’s bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville Tennessee, had a copy. Patchett picked it up.

Upon finishing it, Patchett took to Instagram and TikTok to proclaim her love of the book. She praised both Tee and her bookstore, Christopher’s, by name. She talks about her love of the plot. This created an explosion of sales for the book, and popularity for Niall. This popularity increased exponentially when Patchett wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that used This is Happiness as a frame. So thanks to Niall for painting Ireland in such beautiful colors, and spreading the work with the world. I’m so glad that the Irish Cultural Center is teaming up with Bookshop West Portal to host Niall on Thursday, March 13th 2025. 

We’ll see you there!