NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST and REAL SIMPLE A profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prizelonglisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing. You dont see rain stop but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency youve been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you which at first is only something has changed. The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Nowjust as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricityit is stopping. Seventeenyearold Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he cant explain it Noel knows right then something has changed. This is the story of all that was to follow Christys longlost love and why he had come to Faha Noels own experiences falling in and out of love and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricitya development that once complete would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries. Niall Williams latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community its idiosyncrasies and its traditions its paradoxes and its inanities its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly and yet anchored with deeprunning roots into the earthy and the everyday This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life the ways they make the texture and matter of our world and the ways they write and rewrite us. show more