Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day.

Although invisible to Church and State, it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha, on Sunday morning after Mass, you could see the needles.

and though he had not the words to say so and would only realise it eight years and six thousand miles away, the large, twisted response inside him when he thought of his father was in fact love without condition.

migrating into that other dimension where human beings go when held in each other’s arms.

always inconvenient actuality of love.

He held them long enough for what he could not begin to say to be translated,

claimed that the purpose of ageing was to grow into your soul, the one you have been carrying all along.