In Kiltumper: A Memoire of the Year a Couple Spent in Their Garden

In Kiltumper, Niall Williams and Christine Breen’s beautiful memoir of a year of living in their garden, in their small corner of a rapidly changing world  is on sale August 31.
 
Niall’s most recent novel, This Is Happiness, received rave reviews from The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Real Simple. Readers and reviewers who lost themselves in the Irish lyricism and rural pace of life in This Is Happiness will find further respite with Niall and Christine at home in Kiltumper.
 
“Graceful, evocative…A warm homage to a piece 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.”—Irish Central
 
“I loved their two voices, truthful and gentle and generous, so full of care for their land and for each other. A record of how deeply life can be lived within a garden's walls.”
—Georgina Harding, Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Painter of Silence
 
Told through journal entries from the year and accompanied by Christine’s original drawings, In Kiltumper is an immersive, beautiful account of a year’s passage—a year of taking stock of past choices big and small, and of looking to the future.

Niall Williams is the author of ten novels including This Is Happiness, named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Real Simple, History of the Rain, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Four Letters of Love, for which he has recently completed the screenplay. Christine Breen is the author of Her Name Is Rose and the co-author of four non-fiction books on country living in Ireland.

Praise for This Is Happiness by Niall Williams:
 
“An often delightful, rural rhapsody.”
—The Wall Street Journal
 
“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
 
“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
 
“This big-hearted story is an intimate study of a small place on the brink of change.”
—The New York Times
 
“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
 
“A sweet novel with writing to linger over (you’ll relish the descriptions of rain alone).”
—Real Simple, Best Books of the Year