In his latest novel, Niall Williams returns to the fictional village of Faha in west Ireland, the setting for 2019’s This Is Happiness. It’s December 1962, and in what the parish has come to call “the time of the child”, doctor Jack Troy and his eldest, unmarried daughter Ronnie find their lives upended when an abandoned baby girl, at death’s door, is brought to their home. Jack saves her life and Ronnie takes on the role of carer. They fall in love with the baby Ronnie names Noelle.
There is a cinematic quality to the opening chapter as Williams introduces us to his characters, the rhythm of their lives (“in Faha time did not go straight but round and round”) and the emotional landscape they inhabit: “The inveterate layering of all Irish life, where the most important things were never said, and depth was more valued than surface.”
