Niall Williams

"Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn't changed in a thousand years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now - just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity - the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets...

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love - and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives...

The hero is William, son of an Irish painter who committed suicide and burned his paintings. Only one survived, sold to a poet, and William travels to buy it back. In this way he meets the poet's daughter, Isabel, married for 24 hours and unhappy.

A tale based on John the Apostle's final years places the elderly, blind John in exile on the island of Patmos, until the Roman emperor lifts the ban against Christianity, enabling John's return to the religiously torn region of Ephesus.