This is Happiness

Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards 2020

November choice for the Stephen Colbert Late Show Book Club

"The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone — or would be if he hadn’t cradled it so tenderly in the clover of his prose. 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. 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."​ - Ron Charles, The Washington Post
PUBLISHER: BLOOMSBURY

After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish – the electricity is finally arriving. With it comes a lodger to Noel's home, Christy McMahon. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then:something has changed. As Noel navigates his coming-of-age by Christy's side, falling in and out of love, Christy's buried past gradually comes to light, casting a glow on a small world and making it new.

The Shameless Book Club with Jennifer Garner

Pretty cool 🎬 Jennifer Garner would love to see Niall’s novel adapted to the screen. She’ll very likely get her wish!

The Late Show Book Club with Stephen Colbert

The wonderful team at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert chose This is Happiness by Niall Williams for their November 2025 book club pick.

Read Niall’s OP ED piece "Is Anyone Happy Anymore?" in The New York Times.

Niall’s ninth novel was nominated for The Walter Scott prize, the Irish Book Awards and was listed among The Washington Post’s 50 best novels of 2019.

Reviews

This elegiac novel is as unhurried as its setting: Faha, a village in western Ireland, “unchanged since creation” until, in the late fifties, electricity arrives. The narrator, now elderly, reminisces about that time; having come from Dublin as a teen-ager, to live with his grandparents after the death of his mother, he conceived a hopeless passion for three sisters. “We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m guarding no more,” he promises. 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.

— 'Briefly Notes', The New Yorker
Charming is one word for Williams’ prose. It is also life-affirming and written with a turn of phrase that makes the reader want to underline something on every page. I suggest we all buy his books, pushing him into that realm of globally fashionable Irish writers (which he might not care about), but more importantly, sharing with a vast audience his humane and poetic world view.

— Isabel Berwick, THE FINANCIAL TIMES
It is why this novel is a revelation. The world is chock-full of redemption through pain and all the classes of ugliness and unhappiness that can befall a character en route there. Not this time, however. To borrow a word that crops up occasionally here, Williams' sunny, grainy, gently hilarious saga is an "elsewhere", a place of unashamed romance for a nostalgic tradition of storytelling, where exaggeration and eye twinkles might in fact just bring you closer to the truth. Sublime.

—Hilary White, IRISH INDEPENDENT
Admirers of Niall Williams’s Booker-longlisted History of the Rain will not be disappointed to learn that his latest novel is as good, and possibly even better. It’s set in the remote Irish village of Faha, essentially unchanged in a thousand years, in which the advent of electricity and love have the simultaneous ability to upend expectations and beliefs. What makes this so compelling and enjoyable is Williams’s transparent love of his characters and delight in his setting, a place far removed from any Oirish stereotype. Instead, he depicts somewhere that magic – man-made or otherwise – can quietly transform even the most apparently unchanging of existences.

— Alexander Larman, THE OBSERVER
Williams has painted a lush, wandering portrait of Faha, a village back in time in County Clare, Ireland, a place also featured in his previous novel, “History of the Rain,” which was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. ... “This Is Happiness” is as full of detours and backward glances as it is of forward motion and — as befits a novel narrated by an old man who comments that “as you get toward the end, you revisit the beginning” — is centrally preoccupied with time itself. ...Be kind, he admonishes the reader directly at one point, and it’s a testament to this bighearted novel that I felt duly chastened, almost like a member of the clan.

— Elizabeth Graver, THE NEW YORK TIMES
In this beautifully written novel, every image, every brushstroke is employed to illuminate this chrysalis-to-butterfly moment; the moment that Christy, the stranger, the bringer of electricity and light, enters Noel's life and the life of the villagers. In it, stock characters come alive; the parish priest, the local doctor, the town beauties, the village drunk, but Williams invests them all with such authenticity that you feel like you know them personally, and are wholly the better for it. A warm-hearted and life-affirming read about love and transformation.

— Justine Carberry, THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

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