Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014
By the author of Four Letters of Love, the international bestseller now a major film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan

‘A love letter to literature and storytelling’ Eimear McBride
‘I am utterly obsessed with Niall Williams’ Ann Patchett

In her attic room, with the rain rushing down the windows, Ruthie Swain is trying to find her father through stories.

Brought home after a collapse, she lies surrounded by her father’s library of three thousand, nine hundred and fifty-eight books. But Ruthie’s story, and the story of the Swains before her, is rooted not in these books’ pages, but in the land – fourteen rain-sodden acres of earth useless for farming, but teeming with stories.

From her bed, Ruthie writes Ireland, with its weather, its rivers, its lilts, and its lows. The stories she recounts bring back to life multiple generations buried in this soil – and they might just bring her back into the world again, too.

‘Extremely moving … By the final chapter I was weeping’ Sunday Times
‘Dazzling … Paragraph after paragraph begs you to stop and reread it, to relish the lilt of it in your inner ear’ The Times
‘Beautiful and enchanting … A novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale’ Guardian

Publisher Review

This is an important new book and, without spoiling the riveting last chapter next Friday, the rewards increase tenfold the further into the story one gets * Book at Bedtime, Radio Times * A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale * Guardian * Extremely moving, poignantly capturing Ruth's doomed childhood relationship with her twin brother. By the final chapter I was weeping * Sunday Times * The Anne Enright award for the Irish novel most guaranteed to make you cry ... Niall Williams wins this year's award on the strength of his title alone ... Suffused with warmth and humour * Independent on Sunday * Deeply allusive, infectiously hopeful ... Somewhere between bildungsroman, epic and family saga, History of the Rain is an unashamedly unfashionable, lyrical paean to the pleasure of reading and to serendipity ... A fresh and powerful reminder that: "We tell stories to heal the pain of living * Daily Telegraph * Why Niall Williams's History of the Rain did not win every literary prize is baffling: it provided the most satisfying read of 2014. It is a novel about books and being a bookish, serious reader, as well as about family, Irish village life, devotion and weather, invariably rain. Books rarely make me weep nowadays, but this one did, for all the right reasons - its sublime and funny prose is totally engaging. I could not bear it to end * Kate Johnson, Readers' Books of the Year 2014, Guardian *