Thirty-five 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 townland of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, raising their children 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, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendours and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.
The book concludes with an epilogue about the first half-year of the Pandemic, and is accompanied by 15 of Christine’s pen-and-ink illustrations.
Christine and Niall joined The Bookcase Podcast hosts Kate and Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America to share their story
Niall reads from In Kiltumper
Niall Williams reads from 'In Kiltumper - A Year in an Irish Garden' which he co-wrote with Christine Breen, at Kennys Bookshop, November 2021.
In Kiltumper Reviews
Its byways are as meandering as the garden, winding through meditations on soil, tea, varieties of rain and, this being Ireland, wandering into the mystic. Christine Breen offers brisk, often witty, running commentary; she is a knowledgeable gardener; her illustrations lend a delicate touch. This memoir won't teach you to garden, but it will show you a way of living in and through the garden. Mr. Williams's intention is to "live with purpose." He is a readerly writer, as I think of it: one of the joys of his prose is the generous thrum of other voices--T.S.Eliot, R.W.Emerson, even, in the occasional lilt of a sentence, the King James Bible.
—Dominique Browning, Wall Street Journal
It's a gorgeous year for the garden and they write about it in gorgeous prose, but it's also a difficult year. ... Mostly though the focus of their lives and this book is the garden — the flowers, the vegetables and birds they tend and observe everyday, and the peace it brings them. ... 'We are here now,' [Williams writes]. That thought calms him, and it will calm you.
—Laurie Hertzel, Star Tribune
Country living, Breen reflects, teaches “about darkness and stars, about sunlight and silence, about things out of your control”: about the inevitability of change. The book includes Breen’s elegant botanical drawings. ... A warm homage to a piec' of beloved Irish land.
— Kirkus Reviews
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. ... This book, in Seamus Heaney's phrase, catches the heart off guard.
—Cahir O'Doherty, IrishCentral
A book full of joy, warmly rich with accomplishment and wonder, and a strong sense of mutual commitment. And of Kiltumper itself. ... Chapter after chapter is enhanced with exquisite pencil drawings...
- Mary Leland, Irish Examiner
In Kiltumper is a wonderfully lyrical and uplifting read. It grows into a book that's not just about a garden, but the depth of experience from two lives well lived together.
—Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post
Hardcopy / Paperback
Shelfmark Podcast
In a bonus episode of Shelfmarks, Zoë Comyns chats to guest writers Niall and Christine about their own relationship with their garden and nature. Shelfmarks is a podcast series by the Royal Irish Academy podcaster-in-residence Zoë Comyns.
About Kiltumper
It’s a townland in the west of Ireland in rural County Clare, 14 km from the Wild Atlantic and originally the birthplace of one set of Christine’s ancestors, the Breens. Her grandfather was born in the cottage they now live in. Moving to Ireland from NY in the mid 80s in the midst of a recession when every young Irish person was leaving Ireland they eventually decided to document their life and wrote four non-fiction books, which they refer to as The Kiltumper Quartet, about their experiences of suddenly, overnight becoming rural dwellers in bare four room cottage. The first one is available as an ebook.
