In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden

by Niall Williams, Christine Breen

Overview

From the authors of This Is Happiness and Her Name Is Rose, a memoir of life in rural Ireland and a meditation on the power, beauty, and importance of the natural world.

35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.

In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month-by-month through the year, and with beautiful seasonal illustrations, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendors and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635577181
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	08/31/2021
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Niall Williams was born in Dublin. He is the author of nine novels, including History of the Rain, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and Four Letters of Love, which will soon be a major motion picture starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter, and Gabriel Byrne. His most recent novel, This Is Happiness was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Book of the Year and longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize. He lives in Kiltumper in County Clare, Ireland.

CHRISTINE BREEN was born in New York and educated in Boston and Dublin, where she received an MA in Irish Literature. She is an artist, homeopath, gardener, and mother of two children. She lives in Kiltumper, Ireland with her husband, the novelist Niall Williams, in the cottage where her grandfather was born. Her Name is Rose is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

Moving and surprisingly provocative… This memoir won't teach you to garden, but it will show you a way of living in and through a garden. [Williams] is a readerly writer, as I think of it; one of the joys of his prose is the generous thrum of other voices-T.S. Eliot, R.W. Emerson, even, in the occasional lilt of a sentence, the King James Bible.” —Wall Street Journal

“Gorgeous prose… Mostly, though, the focus of their lives, and this book, is the garden - the flowers, vegetables and birds they tend and observe every day, and the peace it brings them. 'We are both still alive,' Williams says when he has been fretting about things he cannot control. 'We are here now.' That thought calms him, and it will calm you.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Graceful, evocative… A warm homage to a piece of beloved Irish land.” —Kirkus

“What makes this book so remarkable isn't just the quality of the prose, which at times almost made me gasp with its insights into the unique rhythms of Irish life, which it conjures so effortlessly, but also the sense of an ending, a running out of road somewhere up ahead that need not always be dwelled upon.” —Irish Central

“Heartbreaking… uplifting… it has been a delight to step out of this city and into Niall and Chris's precious garden, into the rhythms of their way of living, and to be refreshed.” —Tim Pears, author of THE HORSEMAN

From the Publisher

2021-05-27
A celebration of the solace of country life.

In 1985, Williams, a novelist and playwright, and Breen, a novelist and memoirist, moved from New York to the west of Ireland, to land that had been in Breen’s family for generations. In their latest co-authored chronicle, they recount one year’s rhythms and pleasures, marked by worries, too, over Breen’s health—she has had bowel cancer and is being treated for severe osteoporosis—and the imminent arrival of wind turbines 500 meters from their home. To deliver the machinery, stone walls had to be demolished and their narrow country road widened—regrettable changes. Once the turbines are running, the authors are not sure they will be able to live with the noise. Although they acknowledge the peril of climate change and recognize the need to stop using fossil fuels, the proximity of the turbines feels invasive. Williams is in favor of wind energy “in the ocean. As is the case off the east coast of America, where they have put the turbines fifty-six kilometres out to sea, so they cannot be seen from the land.” Later, he wonders, “How much of the world do we have to spoil in order to save it?” These concerns, however, don’t diminish their delight in their garden, which they describe in graceful, evocative prose. Breen, Williams admits, is “the real gardener,” with a “whole-garden view” and intuitive connection to soil and plants. Williams is the “groundsman,” a role Breen underscores. Both in their 60s, they also reflect on family (their grown children live in New York), loss, and the passage of time, “something a garden keeps redefining in plant terms, not human ones.” Country living, Breen reflects, teaches “about darkness and stars, about sunlight and silence, about things out of your control”: about the inevitability of change. The book includes Breen’s elegant botanical drawings.

A warm homage to a piece of beloved Irish land.

Kirkus Reviews