Niall Williams’ History of the Rain has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize! Completely deservedly – if you haven’t read it yet, it’s the most beautiful, funny, poignant novel.
Bloomsbury UK published on 10th April, and  Bloomsbury US published on 6th May. Spanish rights were pre-empted by Sylvie Querini at Lumen, and Turkish rights to Epsilon so far. This is a sparkling, perfectly formed new novel from the critically acclaimed author of Four Letters of Love, which is currently in production for a major film.
History of the Rain is a funny, sad, hopeless and hopeful chronicle of impossible yearning. In an attic room, in a house by the river in the Irish parish of Faha, a girl begins reading her father's books. She reads them to find him. She reads them because he's gone and because she believes that in these books he chose to keep, in these books he handled, pages he turned, some part of him, maybe even the deepest truest part of him remains. And because in books characters do not die, she begins to tell the story of the Swain family, a hundred years of outlandish dreaming, a story of soldiering, stubborness, and salmon fishing, of fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters, of poetry and God and the puzzle of suffering, and a girl coming through the rain to a gradual growing tentative belief in life and love.
Niall has written six novels, including the globally successful Four Letters of Love. He has spent the last few years on this novel and also writing the screenplay for Four Letters of Love, which Element pictures are currently producing, with Akiva Goldman directing. A producer of many major feature films for Warner Brothers, Akiva was the Oscar-Winning screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind. He has recently completed filming his first feature as director, based on the Mark Halprin novel Winter's Tale, starring Russell Crowe and Will Smith.