This Is Happiness

By: Niall Williams

Narrated by: Dermot Crowley

Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a 1,000 years.

For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity - the rain clouds are lifting.

Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community - its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs - and a coming-of-age tale like no other.

Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.

©2019 Niall Williams (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd

Wonderful

A journey back to old Ireland in the tradition of story telling, that is to reveal a little at a time and keep you eager for more. I loved the narrator's delivery, the protagonist, his family, and surrounding characters. But most of all I loved the poetry-like descriptive prose. This will stay with me a long time, maybe longer.

Exquisite

This story is full of gems which just appear next to you, out of the quiet.

This is Perfect

This may not appeal to young readers as it is a nostalgic journey into pasts no longer existing. However they still exist in our memories, and Williams has crafted a beautiful story of nostalgia that also provide insight and clarity into our own reflections. This Is Happiness is a renewed revelation to all of us that can revel in how rich the ordinary and profound mix together to equal the sum total of our days. What an absolute joy to be reminded that today is happiness. And the narrator is brilliant.

Gorgeous

"And so, because, at the end, we all go back to the beginning.., because after more than 60 years my mind is back in that place among those people from whom I took the lesson of how to be a fully alive human being, I will carry on here, carry on through the electric pulses of this machine to tell the one story we all have, the one we'd lived."

A delightful and heartwarming story

I was completely engrossed in this story and of the land. A true story of living a life well lived and finding happiness.