Grief, suffered alone, can mutate into self-pity and misanthropy. When his wife dies of cancer, James Darke, retired teacher, bibliophile, and world-class snob and curmudgeon entombs himself in the family home. Everyone is shut out. Phones and emails go unanswered. Even the letter box in his front door is removed. Sustaining himself on cigars and alcohol, Darke succumbs to a darkness only occasionally illuminated by a bitter humor. Spoiler alert! He comes out the other side of his bereavement, saved by the love of his daughter and grandson.

Plenty of humor can be found in anger and bitterness, and James Darke is undeniably a great comic character. Neither God, science, literature, or alcohol can keep you alive forever, and ultimately everyone needs to work out life’s meaning for themselves. The lucky ones have the love of others to help them through.

Rick Gekoski is a rare book dealer and many years ago published a very funny account of that peculiar trade (Tolkien’s Gown). Darke is his first novel.

Niall Williams isn’t as well known as he deserves to be. His novels attract good reviews consistently and prizes occasionally, but not the same level of critical attention that some of his peers in Ireland, for example Anne Enright, receive. It’s a shame because there are few novelists as good as Williams when it comes to crafting sentences, not to mention deeply affecting stories.

This is Happiness is a tender and gentle account of a way of life in rural Ireland that’s now largely vanished but which I remember vividly from childhood holidays in West Cork and Connemara. Set in 1958 and in a fictional village called Faha, it tells the story of Noel Crowe, a teenager dispatched to his grandparents’ home in a remote part of West Clare after having bolted from a seminary in Dublin. Noel arrives in a rare moment of sunny, warm weather and in days of transformation as the poles are installed that bring electricity to Faha for the first time. As is the way with such things, on the surface little happens to Noel that summer, but the little that does happen is peculiarly life changing, not least the discovery of love and infatuation and the difference between the two.

The pleasure I get from reading stories has little to do with plot. I’m perfectly happy when nothing happens or appears to happen in a novel. The delight for me that comes from reading anything by Williams is partly the tender evocation of places and people I once knew and recognize in these pages, partly the sheer beauty of his prose, and his appreciation of the rhythms and currents running through our lives. Needless to say, he explains it all better than I can. “It struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round“.