Carolyn's Reviews > This Is Happiness

Reading 'This is Happiness' is like taking a slow trip down a gently flowing river, winding languidly around wide bends, in the company of good friends with long stories to tell, your favourite drink by your side, and all the time in the world to enjoy it. William prose is lush and lyrical and filled with gentle humour and love as he recounts an earlier time in rural Ireland, before the coming of the telephone and electricity, when life was simpler and steeped in tradition.

Noel ('Noe') Crowe is the elderly narrator, looking back 60 years to the 1950s when he was 17 and staying with his grandparents Ganga and Doady in Faha, a small town in County Clare where the rain "was a condition of living". Noe had recently lost his mother and is taking some time away from the seminary where he was training to be a priest after questioning his faith. Life in Faha hadn't changed for decades, but when his grandparents take in a lodger, Christy, at the same time that the rain stops for an unprecedented dry spell, Noe senses change in the air. Christy has travelled and seen the world but now in his sixties has returned to Ireland, taking a job with the Electricity Board to get people to sign up to being connected to the network that will be installed. For Noe it is an exciting time, going on Christy's rounds with him, listening to his stories, going out in the evening to find good music in the pubs, helping Christy find redemption for a past wrong and falling in love for the first time.

There are so many beautiful passages that I underlined and deserve to be quoted here, but that would mean reproducing much of the book, so you'll have to go and read it for yourself and fall in love with the characters and a kind of life that's been and gone. 5★ ++

With many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and Netgalley for a digital copy of the book to read.