PRAISE FOR
John
A Novel

With plenty of imagination and occasionally grandiloquent prose, Williams (Four Letters of Love) pens the last days of the Apostle John, the beloved disciple of Jesus who, tradition says, wrote the wild, apocalyptic book of Revelation as well as the Gospel and Epistles of John. The story begins as John, blind and nearly 100 years old, lives banished on the Island of Patmos where he once received his portentous vision. Surrounded by doubting disciples of his own who pepper him with questions about Christ's return and speak heresy, John remembers his time with Jesus. Williams's present tense narration lends urgency as he interweaves dark and sometimes grotesquely violent threads throughout his story. He beautifully portrays the Christ-followers' loneliness as they yearn for the return of their Messiah and despair at the reception of the Christian message. Some of Williams's prose is fresh and elegant (a bright wind hammers silver out of the sea); at other times it is confusing (the trader unsnaps dogs of curses). The second half of the book loses momentum, but offers interesting conjectures about the explosion of dissenting beliefs after Jesus' death and how people of the time might have responded. This novel will appeal to readers who like imaginative and gritty sagas of the lives of key Christians in the early church as well as those who value lyricism.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR
Boy in the World

A tender coming-of-age novel
-- Daily Mail

With poetic prose that could have been written by angels, combined with a pace that keeps the reader turning the pages!

A Dickens for the 21st century.

A spiritually enriching story of such beauty and magic that is deserves a place not just in the 9/11 canon, but also on the Leaving Cert syllabus as well.
-- Irish Times

At times thoughtful and moving, ultimately it is the empathy the reader feels for the young boy that allows this fine novel to resonate so well.
-- Sunday Business Post

Williams's style is reflective and moving.
-- Metro

Using some really stunning descriptive prose, Williams pulls you gently along on a wave of sounds and pictures. He writes differently, a succeeds in creating vivid images that stay in your mind long after the book is closed.
-- Sunday Tribune

A beautifully crafted story of discovery.
-- Belfast Telegraph

Emotional insightfulness saturates this novel.
-- Sunday Times

PRAISE FOR
The Fall of Light

New York Times Book Review, 5/5/02
"...there is much to relish in William's lush and lilting prose..."

From Publishers Weekly
The travails of the Foley family in the times before and during the Irish potato famine are the subject of Williams's overwrought, unashamedly romantic epic (after Four Letters of Love). Francis Foley inherited his rebel blood from a father who was hung for treason by the English, but his marauding spirit is tamed somewhat when he marries Emer O'Suilleabhain, the daughter of a village schoolteacher. A gardener on the great estate of a mostly absentee grandee, Francis eventually takes to breaking into the big house and looking at the sky through his lordship's telescope, to Emer's dismay; their quarrels escalate into violence and she leaves him. Francis, desperate to find her, packs up his four sons, steals the telescope, sets fire to the estate and runs off. So begins a series of disasters that sees the Foley boys Tomas, Teige and the twins, Finbar and Finan separated and reunited several times as their destinies carry them to Hungary, America and Africa. Tomas, the oldest, falls in love with a beautiful prostitute named Blath, for whom he kills a man. Teige, the youngest, becomes a locally famous horse tamer and runs off with Elizabeth, the daughter of the squire he works for, and Finbar winds up the leader of a gypsy band. Francis himself is nearly drowned, and is rescued by monks; he searches for his sons and is finally reunited with Emer, now a blind woman. Williams veers from lyricism to blarney in swooping, misty paragraphs sure to please his readership.

From Booklist
The author of the acclaimed debut novel Four Letters of Love (1997), Williams once again features a father undone by grandiose dreams. Sick to death of the menial chores required and the disrespect he suffers as a gardener on a vast estate in Ireland, working for an absentee landlord, Francis Foley steals a splendid telescope from the owner's large library. His wife, tired of constantly being on the move and of her husband's refusal to put his family before his pride, has taken off. In order to escape the law, Francis and his four sons sneak away in the middle of the night. In attempting to cross a turbulent river, the sons become separated from their father and eventually from each other. Now the father wants nothing more than what he once had: the closeness and comfort of his family. Williams expertly covers a lot of territory -- the stark tragedy of the potato famine, the ability to speak to horses, the pull of the stars -- giving his resonant, fable-like story the grand sweep of an epic.
-- Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR
As It Is In Heaven

The New York Times Book Review, Meghan O'Rourke
The novel's less portentous moments demonstrate the author's ear for language and easy, confident gaze.

The Times (London)
Rolls with courage and clarity towards a breathtaking affirmation of magic, miracles, and the power of human love. Read it, and believe in angels.

USA Today
In spare, beautiful language, Williams wonderfully explores the mystery that is love.

Boston Globe
A deeply spiritual work of art....Niall Williams has achieved a master stroke with this novel.

San Francisco Chronicle
Lush and lyrical, a compelling meditation on love, art, and the vicissitudes of love.

From Booklist, June 1, 1999
Richly woven with mysticism and melancholy, this is the improbable and suspenseful love story of Stephen Griffin, a shy, naive, and withdrawn Irish schoolteacher, and Gabriella Castoldi, a sophisticated, artistically passionate yet emotionally distant Italian violinist. Williams' first novel, Four Letters of Love (1997), received widespread critical acclaim for its moving story of love and hope told with spiritual overtones and thoughtful characterizations. This tale follows along similar lines, yet it is rendered in a far more somber, even downcast tone. The intensive brooding gets to be almost overbearing at times, but it is balanced by an aura of magic, eloquent sensitivity, and the dramatic unfolding of this unlikely love's consequences not only for the lovers, but for an entire cast of intriguing characters. With his lush descriptions of the music of Puccini, Mozart, and Vivaldi as well as lingering looks at Ireland's hauntingly beautiful green hills and forbidding rocky coastline, Williams creates a stirring setting for this serious exploration of the themes of family and friendship, companionship and loneliness, and desolation and redemption.
-- Catherine Sias
Copyright© 1999, American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus Reviews
An appealing romantic tale about the love of an introverted schoolteacher for a beautiful Italian musician: from the Irish author of several popular nonfiction books as well as the highly praised novel Four Letters of Love (1997). In a wistful voice thats somewhat reminiscent of William Trevors understated stories of modest lives in crisis and conflict, Williams fashions a compelling narrative that evolves from the separate consciousness of several thoughtfully dreamy souls. Lanky and nondescript 30ish Stephen Griffin is a history teacher whose self-effacing loneliness becomes transfigured by his fascination with Gabriella Castoldi, a violinist who falls in love with Ireland while performing there and settles not far from Stephens hometown. His father Philip is a widower dying of cancer but still mourning the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter long agoand bargaining with God to allow him enough life to help his son through the passion that Philip intuitively recognizes as the reincarnation of his own romantic devotion. The vacillating interrelations, intimacies, and disappointments of these three are neatly related to the lives of people they variously encounter, including a kindly Indian doctor unavoidably estranged from his own family and a preternaturally wise greengrocer who believes in the healing powers of fresh produce. Theres a lot to likeand more than a little to gag onin this whimsical story, which is both enriched by stunning metaphor (trees stiffened in the long arthritis of brutal weathering) and burdened with treacly summarizations (Stephen and Gabriella loved and lived in a sweet innocence and ate their meals and listened to music and played chess). Williams's faux-naive prose draws you in, all right, but his penchant for homiletic simplification and touchy-feely sentimentality may make you begin enraptured by the tales clarity of folktale and finish stupefied by the formulaic smugness of pop fiction at its most fulsome.
-- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR
Four Letters of Love

From Kirkus Reviews , July 1, 1997
A remarkable first novel from Williams--whose four previous books, written with his wife, have chronicled contemporary Irish life (The Luck of the Irish, 1995, etc.)--offers a powerful portrait of tragedy and of the redemption offered by love. Nicholas was a normal Dublin 12-year-old when his civil- servant father came home to announce he'd forsaken his career to become a painter. The full implications of that decision became clear shortly thereafter: Abandoning wife and son, the artist went off to the Irish countryside for the summer. After two summers of this and no income, Nicholas's mother committed suicide. Father and son struggled on, making one memorable painting trip to the western coast, after which cows destroyed many of the paintings, leaving the artist in doubt of his vocation. Years pass. Nicholas's own civil service career is cut short when his father burns his paintings, their house, and himself. Only one painting remains, a work that had been purchased and given as an award to a poet living on one of the western isles, and Nicholas goes to see whether he can buy it back. The poet's family is also familiar with despair: The only son, a musical prodigy, suffered a seizure one day while playing for his dancing sister, Isabel, and for years has been unable to play or speak. Isabel, blaming herself for his affliction, grew wild in her mainland convent school and threw away a good chance at a university education to marry a coarse, unprosperous tweed merchant whom she doesn't love. Nicholas arrives on the scene the day after Isabel's wedding, and his presence magically, inexplicably, begins to cause a shift in the prevailing winds of fortune. While a wealth of impressions linger from this debut, two words come most often to mind in describing it: Spellbinding. Brilliant.
-- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR
The Luck of the Irish

From Booklist , January 1, 1995
In several books, Williams and Breen recorded, in romantic detail, their escape from New York's rat race to a life in the west of Ireland that seemed every stressed-out American's dream--living in harmony with nature, surrounded by eloquent country folk, at peace with the world and themselves. Muttering cynics will love their new book, for, yup, Paddy, that life ain't what it seemed. A decade into it, Williams and Breen have given up the cows and taken part-time jobs. They struggle with the political and social tensions of their changing homeland. They watch as the countryside they love becomes depopulated and Irish farming economically devastated. The new book affords a fierce, realistic picture of Ireland today, one many Irish-Americans, who devoured the couple's last few books like soda bread on March 17, may not wish to hear. But perhaps the pair's popularity--and charm and vibrancy--will serve through this book to draw attention to the real difficulties the rural Irish face.
-- Patricia Monaghan
Copyright© 1995, American Library Association. All rights reserved