This Is Happiness

'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive'
Sunday Times

'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone'
Irish Independent

“Admirers of Niall Williams's Booker-longlisted History of the Rain will not be disappointed to learn that his latest novel is possibly even better … What makes this so compelling and enjoyable is Williams's transparent love of his characters and delight in his setting”
Alexander Larman Observer

“Charming is one word for Williams' prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page. I suggest we all buy his books, pushing him into that realm of globally fashionable Irish writers, but more importantly, sharing with a vast audience his humane and poetic world view”
Isabel Berwick Financial Times

“Williams has the eye of a poet and the raconteur's knack for finding a tale in the most unpromising nook of everyday life, as a now-adult Noel, summoning the Faha of his nostalgic imagination, narrates an elegiac novel that's careful always to offset the antic rural eccentricity with darker notes of loss”
Daily Mail

“ This is Happiness returns to the beguiling gloom of Faha … [A] wise and redemptive novel … It dares, in addition, to be wildly comic … With his silver ear for speech and extreme attentiveness to the Heaneyesque “music of everyday”, Mr Williams treads softly on the dreams of youth and memories of old age”
Caroline Jackson Country Life

Praise for 'History of the Rain':

“A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale”
Guardian