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Irish novelist Niall Williams is the best-selling author of “Four Letters of Love,” “History of the Rain,” and “This Is Happiness.” His widely acclaimed new novel, “Time of the Child,” tells of a Christmas season that transformed one small Irish town.
‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney (1984)
Seamus’ are the books most taken down from the shelf. There are three sections to “Station Island,” but it’s the 33-page title poem that seems to me a masterpiece. It is a narrative sequence, both confessional and dramatic, and has the questing urgency of all pilgrimages to arrive at a place of peace. Buy it here.
‘The World-Ending Fire’ by Wendell Berry (2017)
This is a collection of essays from 1968 to 2011, written with Berry’s signature grace and gravitas. Each piece stakes out its ground with authority and the wisdom that comes from paying close attention to the land. After reading one of these essays, you pause, lift your head, and go outside. Buy it here.
‘Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens (1861)
The book that made me want to be a novelist. Reading it in a classroom at age 14 meant that it entered me like no book before or since. Dickens’ world was more real than the Dublin outside. When Pip fell in love with Estella, so did I; when his heart was broken, mine was too. Buy it here.
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson (1980)
A flawless thing, this hauntingly beautiful novel tells the story of two sisters’ haphazard upbringing under the care of an eccentric aunt. The narration is hued with melancholy, the sentences hypnotic, and the whole book made with a grace not often found in fiction. Buy it here.
‘The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store’ by James McBride (2023)
McBride was one of those novelists whose books I was long aware of but had somehow never read. When that was at last remedied, this novel transported me into a richly human world of overlapping stories both heartbreaking and heart-lifting. It’s an armchair of a novel. You sit into it and don’t want to leave. Buy it here.
‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
There are some novels that you read in awe. This is one of those. The story of an evangelical Baptist who brings his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959, it is told through the daughters’ voices, each one so perfectly caught that you can only bow to the craft and scope and majesty of the storytelling. Buy it here.
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