Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

but rain and religion had left the people a twinned philosophy of offering it up and getting on with it.

But, recognising

himself the dangerous innocence of the old, who are always secretly hoping for a chance to love properly, Jack Troy put up a shield of indifference. And though later he would return

It was the first time in the history of the parish that a room was not aimed at the fireplace.

‘They’re a bit dry,’ said Ronnie, before anyone could praise the scones. She was unsurpassed in finding fault in herself. It was not a ploy. When she voiced a criticism in how she had done something, it was not so that you would tell her otherwise, it was

because she had a helpless addiction to truth.

The chest was bronchial with them.

To date, the doctor’s score on domestic duties was low. At the time, it was understood to be the inevitable result of brains in boys, and mothers who, in wonderment at an intelligence that had travelled through their wombs, kept forgetting to tell them to pick their clothes up off the floor. Added to this was

the natural male blindness to bins that needed emptying, to the order of the linen closet and the cutlery drawer, the sheets with the sheets and the pillowcases with the pillowcases, knives with knives and forks with forks, to the dust of the floor and the film on the windows, along with a fathomless tolerance for living in rooms that, left to their own devices, would soon recall the cave of the caveman. From time to time, like a seasonal flu,

She was beyond eating or drinking, on the ledge between this life and the next, but day after day remaining so. It was a condition he had seen before, this remaining. He had sat at bedsides

Sorrow is the longest thing in life, and going back the preferred way of an old mind. What thorns of regret

He saw none of it. He was in the elsewhere of the heart and had the same feeling as all readers who are approaching the narrow end of a book: How is this going to end? But now, for the first time since

The doctor had showed no concern. He had arrived at the serenity that knows the world is larger than himself and was sitting with the same attention as one being told a story.