In Kiltumper - by Niall Williams & Christine Breen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

From the authors of This Is Happiness and Her Name Is Rose, a memoir of life in rural Ireland and a meditation on the power, beauty, and importance of the natural world.

35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.

In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month-by-month through the year, and with beautiful seasonal illustrations, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendors and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

Review Quotes

"Moving and surprisingly provocative... This memoir won't teach you to garden, but it will show you a way of living in and through a garden. [Williams] is a readerly writer, as I think of it; one of the joys of his prose is the generous thrum of other voices-T.S. Eliot, R.W. Emerson, even, in the occasional lilt of a sentence, the King James Bible." --Wall Street Journal

"Gorgeous prose... Mostly, though, the focus of their lives, and this book, is the garden - the flowers, vegetables and birds they tend and observe every day, and the peace it brings them. 'We are both still alive, ' Williams says when he has been fretting about things he cannot control. 'We are here now.' That thought calms him, and it will calm you." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Graceful, evocative... A warm homage to a piece of beloved Irish land." --Kirkus

"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

"Heartbreaking... uplifting... it has been a delight to step out of this city and into Niall and Chris's precious garden, into the rhythms of their way of living, and to be refreshed." --Tim Pears, author of THE HORSEMAN

About the Author

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.

Together, they live in Kiltumper in County Clare, Ireland.