In Kiltumper : A Year in an Irish Garden

From the authors of This Is Happiness and Her Name Is Rose, a memoir of life in rural Ireland and a meditation on the power, beauty, and importance of the natural world.

35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.

In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month-by-month through the year, and with beautiful seasonal illustrations, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendors and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

“Graceful, evocative… A warm homage to a piece of beloved Irish land.” —Kirkus

“What makes this book so remarkable isn't just the quality of the prose, which at times almost made me gasp with its insights into the unique rhythms of Irish life, which it conjures so effortlessly, but also the sense of an ending, a running out of road somewhere up ahead that need not always be dwelled upon.” —Irish Central

“Heartbreaking… uplifting… it has been a delight to step out of this city and into Niall and Chris's precious garden, into the rhythms of their way of living, and to be refreshed.” —Tim Pears, author of THE HORSEMAN

“A book so beautiful and so funny and so true that it will make you love the whole human race and forgive it all its trespasses.” —New York Times Book Review on THIS IS HAPPINESS

“This elegiac novel is as unhurried as its setting… The novel's description of a lost rural life style, and the gaps between a young man's romantic expectations and the inescapable letdown of reality, is comic and poignant in equal measure.” —The New Yorker on THIS IS HAPPINESS

“This big-hearted story is an intimate study of a small place on the brink of change.” —The New York Times on THIS IS HAPPINESS

“An often delightful, rural rhapsody.” —Wall Street Journal on THIS IS HAPPINESS

“Escaping into the pages of This Is Happiness feels as much like time travel as enlightenment. Halfway through, I realized that if I didn't stop underlining passages, the whole book would be underlined…. Williams is engaged in the careful labor of teaching us to hear the subtler melodies drowned out by the din of modern life… This is a story about the beginnings of love and the persistence of affection, about the loss of faith and the recovering of belief. If you're a reader of a certain frame of mind, craving a novel of delicate wit laced with rare wisdom, this, truly, is happiness.” —The Washington Post on THIS IS HAPPINESS

“A sweet novel with writing to linger over (you'll relish the descriptions of rain alone).” —Real Simple, Best Books of the Year, on THIS IS HAPPINESS