History Of The Rain

In Niall Williams’ celebration of books, love and the healing power of the imagination, a bedridden daughter of a dead poet searches for her father.

Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Ruth Swain looks for her father. Sent home from school after a collapse, Ruth is trying to find her father through stories - and through generations of family history in County Clare. In order to do this, Ruthie turns to the three thousand, nine hundred and fifty-eight books that her father left behind - which she pledges to work her way through while she still lives. 

"A rambling, soft-hearted Irish family saga stuffed with eccentricity, literature, anecdotes, mythology, humor and heartbreak, from the author of Four Letters of Love (1997). Williams returns to home turf with a long, sentimental, affectionate poem to Irishness generally—“the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world’s worst bankers”—and one quirky family in particular that insists on being read at its own erratic pace."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Niall Williams cut his teeth as a writer with four non-fiction books written with his American wife Christine Breen about life in their cottage in County Clare, Ireland. County Clare was preceded by University College Dublin, a year in Caen in Normandy and time in New York where Williams worked opening boxes of books in a bookshop just north of New York.  As well as novels, Williams has written plays and YA fiction.