In his lyrical, gentle novel of events in Faha, Ireland, during the Advent season of 1962, Niall Williams offers the Christmas gift of a tender homage to community.
Time of the Child returns to the village of Williams's 2019 novel, This Is Happiness, but readers new to Faha will feel at home. It's "a place where the tide came in and out like memory and the rain made all the seasons one," and where villagers eagerly follow their neighbors' lives "through hearsay, which travelled quicker than fact and without the baggage of truth." The esteemed Dr. Jack Troy has inherited his father's practice and relies on his genteel, dependable daughter, Ronnie. It seems only logical that when 12-year-old Jude Quinlan, obligingly waiting in the cold to escort his father home from the pub, discovers an abandoned newborn baby at the church gate, he delivers the bundle to the Troys. Father and daughter, "in a confederacy," agree that they "will work out something." Knowing that the baby legally "belonged to the State, who... would hand it off to the Church," the Troys provide baby Noelle a loving, secret family.
Unsuspecting Faha residents continue to rely on Dr. Troy's ministrations to their life-and-death dramas, even as he anticipates the sorrow of Ronnie forfeiting Noelle. The "story that had come knocking on his door" seems destined to end in heartbreak, but when the parishioners gather for Christmas Eve Mass, baby Noelle among them, Dr. Troy realizes "it was possible to believe in human goodness." --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.