This is an important new book and, without spoiling the riveting last chapter next Friday, the rewards increase tenfold the further into the story one gets * Book at Bedtime, Radio Times *
A surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale * Guardian *
Extremely moving, poignantly capturing Ruth's doomed childhood relationship with her twin brother. By the final chapter I was weeping * Sunday Times *
The Anne Enright award for the Irish novel most guaranteed to make you cry ... Niall Williams wins this year's award on the strength of his title alone ... Suffused with warmth and humour * Independent on Sunday *
Deeply allusive, infectiously hopeful ... Somewhere between bildungsroman, epic and family saga, History of the Rain is an unashamedly unfashionable, lyrical paean to the pleasure of reading and to serendipity ... A fresh and powerful reminder that: We tell stories to heal the pain of living * Daily Telegraph *
Why Niall Williams's History of the Rain did not win every literary prize is baffling: it provided the most satisfying read of 2014. It is a novel about books and being a bookish, serious reader, as well as about family, Irish village life, devotion and weather, invariably rain. Books rarely make me weep nowadays, but this one did, for all the right reasons - its sublime and funny prose is totally engaging. I could not bear it to end * Kate Johnson, Readers' Books of the Year 2014, Guardian *