In Kiltumper

A Year in an Irish Garden

By: Niall Williams, Christine Breen

Narrated by: Niall Williams, Christine Breen

Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

Bloomsbury presents In Kiltumper by Niall Williams and Christine Breen.

From the authors of This Is Happiness and Her Name Is Rose, a memoir of life in rural Ireland and a meditation on the power, beauty and importance of the natural world.

Thirty-five years ago, when they were in their 20s, 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 the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening 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 observing its wonders.

©2021 Niall Williams and Christine Breen (P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Life woven into a place, a garden.

The author's voice is engaging and real. So Very meaningful, capturing beauty and despair, hope.

A Sleeper with a Wollongong

I love this author so I gave it a try. Boy am I glad I did! I have such a different take on “green lifestyle “. A beautifully crafted tale

Wonderful, wonderful wonderful book!

There are so many areas of life that the authors touch on in this book! The realities run the range of all emotions!And the authors capture it all with imagery that escapes most of us! The book makes you want to go to Kiltumper and become one of the neighbors and raise a garden and a life beside them!!

Marvelous!

Loved the text and the reading. A beautiful companion listen both in and out of the garden.

An intimate, beautifully written memoir

This is a lovely, contemplative book. A more intimate or more beautifully written memoir is difficult to imagine. It is about so much--the immeasurable love of place, in this case of an ancestral home in West Ireland and the garden its inhabitants nurture and extend; how a person affects a place, and a place affects a person in return; the timeless progress of seasons --of quiet, then promise, then bounty; the surprises a garden yields; the difficulty and financial uncertainties of depending on writing for an income. Also: battling and surviving cancer and the healing power of gardening; the straightening of the roads, demolition of hundred-years-old stone walls, and taking down of grand, healthy trees--to accommodate a single day when wind turbines will be transported to a wind 'farm' and begin their ceaseless whir; and more. Listen, read, and be glad.

❤️❤️❤️

I am a huge fan of Niall Williams. I also love gardens. I could listen to this again and again!

Inspiration for gardeners everywhere

Hearing Niall and Christina’s voices as they share their year in Kiltumper was such an intimate experience. I had to keep looking up names of plants! Sominspiring.

Nope, should have returned it

I LOVED LOVED LOVED his This is Happiness, but this is quite different. I am a gardener, I too am worried about climate change, and I share all of his views. But I did not need this book, in which he spends maybe 1/3 of the time railing about the impact of a wind farm being installed in their neighborhood. He got into the diatribe just a little too late to return the book, sadly.
I loved his Irish accent, and her voice too, but they both sounded so SAD.