Will I love This Is Happiness?

This is a gentle book, with great depth of feeling and wisdom. It is not a novel that hangs on plot, but on the characters and the ways they go through a life that can be both bewildering and precious. There were so many passages that I marked because of the beauty of the thought, and often the beauty of the expression. The novel is never sentimental, though, and there is clever and sometimes touching humor, such as: "Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation."

This book is… show more.

This book touches on so much that is important in life: growing up, enduring love in its many forms, the meaning of community. It depicts with incredible sensitivity and insight rural life in Ireland in a way that is both very specific and universal. The writing is gorgeous, one needs to imbibe this book slowly, it leaves a wonderful after-taste.

Set in the Irish village of Faha in County Clare, Noe is a 78-year-old man looking back to the spring of 1958, a summer when, miraculously, it never rains and when “the electricity” is about to come to this rural backwater. Noe has dropped out of the seminary after his mother’s death, reeling from grief, and gone to live with his grandparents in Faha, where he spent time as a child.

As if to emphasize how slowly time moves in a “forgotten elsewhere,” Wlliams never rushes his plot or his prose. Faha comes alive in his hands with lovingly detailed… show more.

This is a fictional memoir of a golden past. Set in early twentieth-century Ireland, it recounts a vanished time when happiness didn’t depend on possessions but on relationships and the deep connection with the land. It alternately charms you and breaks your heart as you’re immersed in a time and place that was so demanding yet so splendid.

I have told everyone I know to read this book because it is important literature. Set in an obscure town in Ireland on the cusp of getting electricity (1950s) it carries the big weight of humanity with its small lives and big undying, heartbreaking loves. The writing is gorgeous, close to divine. Read it and weep at its impact on your soul.

The voice! The narrator is so incredibly endearing. The almost subversive humour was delightful. The pace was deliberate and the various threads so-well crafted, I have listened to this book three times. It makes me so happy.

I loved being immersed in this world. The story is incredibly sweet without being at all sentimental.

This was another book that transported me to another world. It's written so poetically and is populated by such eccentric and dlightful characters. Its particular gift is to demonstrate the 'roundaboutation' of its story by a roundabout way of telling it. Wonderful book.

I loved this book because Niall Williams transported me to Faha, a small Irish parish in western Ireland on the verge of having electricity installed, and I happily lived there with the characters at the crossroads into modernity and didn’t want my visit to end.

I worked on a documentary in Ireland in 1983, lived with Irish families, visited pubs, and listened to live music, and this book happily brought me back. Williams’s veneration for Irish humor, music and musicians is clear in his writing that captures the lyricism of the music and poetry. He describes poignant moments with such… show more.

From page one, I fell in love with the language of the book, its meandering pace, and the voice and temperament of the narrator.

At 78, Noe Crowe looks back on the year he lived with his grandparents in a remote County Clare village when he was 17. His time there coincides with the arrival of electricity in western Ireland, an event that will change a way of life that has been the same for centuries.

Noe befriends his grandparents’ lodger Christy—an older man who is an equal parts conman, dreamer, and guru—and their adventures, along with the convoluted progress… show more.