Four Letters of Love: A Novel

by Niall Williams

Nothing in the natural world is random, was the principal tenet in William Coughlan’s philosophy. Witness the salmon swimming out into the vastness of the seas, the unmappable and unmarked immensity of water that was almost beyond dimension to the solitary fish; and then his return, the staggering leap upriver and the glittering homewardness that brought the salmon back again. Why? Because just so it was meant to be. It was the scheme of things. Once you understood the scheme of things, he said, you had no worries. What was right was right. It was undeniable, there was a place for everything; everything God made fit somewhere.