About the Book
**Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award**
**Shortlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award**
**The instant Irish Times Top Ten bestseller**
A heartbreaking and life-affirming novel about small towns and second chances - from the international bestselling author of Four Letters of Love
‘I am utterly obsessed with Niall Williams’ Ann Patchett
‘A rich and gorgeous book’ The Times, The 10 best historical fiction books of 2024
‘Irresistible … A powerful pleasure’ Karen Joy Fowler
‘Deeply compassionate’ Guardian
‘Slow, rich, immaculate ... One of the most affecting books I've ever read’ The Times
‘A beautifully written novel about second chances and familial love’ Observer
‘A story brimming with kindness and courage’ Mail on Sunday
‘A warm and life-affirming story about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths’ Irish Times
‘Line by line, it may be the most beautifully written novel I’ve read this year’ Washington Post
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Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in the little town of Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from his community. A visit from the doctor is always a sign of bad things to come.
His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed her chance at real love – and passed up an offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.
But in the advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter’s lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.
'My own life feels richer having read it' Mary Beth Keane
'A triumph ... There is so much to admire: the lyrical language, how landscape and destiny intertwine, the complex bonds of community' Ron Rash
About the Author :
Niall Williams was born in Dublin in 1958. His critically acclaimed and bestselling fiction has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC Award. Williams’ debut novel Four Letters of Love, an international bestseller, has been adapted by the author for screen and will star Helena Bonham-Carter, Pierce Brosnan and Gabriel Byrne. His most recent novel Time of the Child was an instant Irish Times bestseller and was awarded the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award. He lives in Kiltumper in County Clare, with his wife, Christine.
niallwilliams.com
Review :
There is something of Trollope’s Barsetshire here, in the sense of an entire place rendered in fine detail ... Williams’s phrasing is immaculate and even the smallest characters are drawn with attention and detail. But Dr Troy is the heart of this slow, rich novel. The scene in which he dances with the baby in a quiet kitchen is one of the most affecting I’ve read
A compellingly emotional experience that catches the breath and doesn’t let up until it reaches its final, dramatic conclusion
Time of the Child dazzles as both Christmas tale and erudite novel ... A stylistic cousin to the vernacular achievements of Kevin Barry and Roddy Doyle, but also distinctive ... Williams packs his paragraphs with lush imagery and piercing psychological insight. Let’s raise a glass of mulled wine to an Emerald Isle master at the peak of his powers
When I cried, it was because, with his careful and compassionate depictions of people, place and time, Williams reminds us of the humanity in all, of the vitality of a community that comes together, and of the power in revealing our vulnerabilities to others
An exquisite portrayal of the characters, weather, geography and everyday life in rural west Ireland in 1962 ... Akin to Dickens in his brilliantly detailed observations ... Kind, wry, funny and poignant, this needs a great film director
My new favourite ... A study in human community that made me laugh out loud and remember how to love even the people who cause others so much suffering, and especially those who come together to ease it
Williams, always skilful and compelling, has wrought something plausible out of one of the oldest stories we have ... Williams’s delicacy in depicting the mysteries of interactions both human and divine is quietly satisfying ... Williams excels in his characterisation
Williams’s newest is another master class in stunningly poetic depictions of the sorrow and beauty of arduous lives
There’s a quiet grace to this slow-paced, poetic novel set in rural Ireland in the run-up to Christmas 1962 ... A story brimming with kindness and courage
Readers looking to get into the Christmas spirit early this year will find plenty of it in Niall Williams’s new novel, Time of the Child, a warm and life-affirming story about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths
The genius – yes, genius – of Niall Williams is his evocation of the ordinary, which in his hands becomes an exaltation. He shares with Marilynne Robinson and Anne Tyler the gift of seeing the sublime in the everyday, a series of précises of each and every human soul
A sublime tale of small-town Irish life ... A slow-burning, finely crafted novel about second chances, humanity and familial love, Time of the Child rewards close reading ... Williams’s descriptive language is extraordinary – his use of understatement and irony artfully deployed, his characterisation sublime. I find it astonishing that, despite his global success, he has yet to win a big award
A powerful pleasure to find myself back in Faha where the prose is luminous, the people irresistible, the stories mesmerizing, and it never stops raining
A remarkably wonderful book … I was in tears
Heartwarming ... If you are looking for a novel that speaks to our better angels, pick up Time of the Child
Williams quietly lets us glimpse the story’s underlying harshness between the lines of his warm and finely turned festive tale ... A lyrical, mid-20th-century tapestry set in a slowly transforming society as the advent of electricity revolutionises everyday life
In this poignant novel, miracles abound ... Time of the Child is an engrossing read, the dark and the rain and the shabby but hopeful holiday decorations blending with the peat smoke and the love, all coming fully alive on the page. And that is something of a miracle itself
Kind and funny ... Akin to Dickens in his observations, Williams’ descriptions of gesture hint at his characters’ interior landscapes
With writing so stunning, Time of the Child forces the reader to turn down page after page to always remember what genius is. Another glorious and touching novel from Niall Williams, one of the world's greatest storytellers
A shimmering portrait of a gradually shifting social landscape ... Williams is a lyrical writer who takes his time. He specializes in resonant moments
Gorgeous, wry and humane ... Time of the Child may have the best sentences of any novel this year
On the surface, Time of the Child by Niall Williams is an elegiac portrait of life in an Irish village in the Christmas season of 1962. But it is so much more than that. Somehow, by laying bare the inner lives of these decent country people, my own life feels so much richer for having read it. I was deeply moved by this novel
There is so much to admire in Niall Williams new novel - the lyrical language, how landscape and destiny intertwine, the complex bonds of community - but what impresses most is how vividly he enters the innermost thoughts of his characters, thus revealing their seemingly quiet existences brim with the profoundest questionings of how we should live our lives. Time of the Child is a triumph
It’s rare in contemporary fiction to see a community so well imagined and brought vividly to life ... Time of the Child might be just the gift we all need for the holidays
A Christmas tale of the very best sort, one that reminds us of the fundamental mystery of being human. Even in this sinking parish on the furthermost edge of nowhere, in the dark and dying time of the year, there’s something in the air that speaks of the miraculous
Oh, the utter goosebumpy pleasure of reading this book! The experience will fill you up, even if you didn't know there was an emptiness there to begin with. Niall Williams reminds us again and again that the small and the ordinary are married to amazement, that dailiness and miracles walk hand in hand, and that other people are a mystery: Approach with curiosity! Approach with grace
Niall Williams is one of Ireland’s greatest storytellers, and Time of the Child is his finest, and most compelling work to date
Praise for Niall Wiliams: A beautiful writer
What makes this so compelling and enjoyable is Williams’s transparent love of his characters and delight in his setting
Williams’ prose .... is 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
Williams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland … We are invited to lower ourselves into a slower kind of time ... [A] bighearted novel
Williams has the eye of a poet and the raconteur’s knack for finding a tale in the most unpromising nook of everyday life
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
A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale
A luminously written, magical work of fiction
