This Is Happiness

Regarding This Is Joy

From the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-nominated History of the Rain comes the most enthralling book you'll read this year.

Faha, a little Irish parish that hasn't altered in a millennium, is about to undergo transformation.

To start with, the rain is ceasing. On the western shore, rain is a way of life; nobody can remember when it began. But now the rain clouds are parting, just as Father Coffey announces the arrival of the power. Noel Crowe, seventeen, is lazing about in the sudden brightness when Christy enters Faha for the first time, carrying secrets he must atone for. Noel knows then, even if he is unable to express it, that something has changed.

Christy's history slowly comes to light, adding a fresh light to a little universe as Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love and the residents of Faha await the much-anticipated arrival of electricity.

This Is Happiness, which transports the reader back to a more innocent era, is a poignant depiction of a community with all of its quirks and customs, contradictions and generosity, setbacks and victories, and a unique coming-of-age story. Beautiful and poetic, but grounded in the real and mundane, it explores the power of tales and their unseen currents that permeate all we do, shaping and reshaping who we are and the world around us.