History of the Rain: A Novel - Softcover

Williams, Niall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620407701 ISBN 13: 9781620407707

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2015

Synopsis

Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories--and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have the oral) and through her own writing (with its Superabundance of Style). Ruthie turns also to the books her father left behind, his library transposed to her bedroom and stacked on the floor, which she pledges to work her way through while she's still living.

In her attic room, with the rain rushing down the windows, Ruthie writes Ireland, with its weather, its rivers, its lilts, and its lows. The stories she uncovers and recounts bring back to life multiple generations buried in this soil--and they might just bring her back into the world again, too.

About this title

About the Author:

Niall Williams was born in Dublin and studied at University College Dublin. His work includes stage plays, screenplays, nonfiction (co-written with his wife, Christine Breen), and, to date, seven novels. His first novel, Four Letters of Love, was an international bestseller, published in more than twenty countries, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Williams has been twice nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize. He lives in the west of Ireland.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* From her boat-shaped bed in the attic room of her family’s County Clare thatched-roof home, invalid Ruth Swain tries to uncover the secret of her father’s tortured life. She is surrounded by the thousands of books he devoured, everything from Dostoyevsky to Dickens, García Marquez to Galsworthy. In the stories of others, Ruth hopes to find her own family’s story, which begins with her rigidly religious great-grandfather, who set in motion the Swain quest for impossibly high standards. The failure to meet them will resonate for generations, culminating in the struggles of her father, Virgil, a dreamer and fisherman, the Irish prerequisites for becoming a poet. His inspiration arrived the night Ruth and her twin brother, Aeney, were born; it died the day Aeney drowned. Now housebound with a mysterious ailment, Ruth wants to write her father’s story in a book of her own before she dies. You can smell the peat burning and feel the ever-present mist in acclaimed Irish novelist Williams’ (John, 2008) luscious paean to all who lose themselves in books. Williams captures the awe and all of Ireland—its myths and mysteries, miseries and magic—through the pitch-perfect voice of a saucily defiant young woman who has witnessed too much tragedy but who clings devotedly to those she’s lost. --Carol Haggas

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1620407701
• ISBN 13: 9781620407707
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368