A warm-hearted and uplifting memoir of their life in rural Ireland by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. 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.

"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