This Is Happiness

The most enchanting novel you'll read this year, from the acclaimed author of 'History of the Rain'. Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn't changed in a thousand years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now—just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity—the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world. 'This Is Happiness' is a tender portrait of a community—its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs—and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet rooted in the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light they throw onto our world.