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Niall Williams’ History of the Rain is marvellous; an absolute wonder of potent, heart-wrought narrative assembled in astonishing prose. Ruth Swain is nineteen and bedbound in county Clare. In an attic-room, underneath a sky-light streaming with rain she is writing a history of poetry and tragedy, of aspiration and failure, of Ireland and of her family. Guided by the 3,958 books he has left her, she carves out the story of her poet father, of his ancestors, and of her own beautiful, lost twin brother.

As a character, Ruth herself constitutes one of Williams’ biggest achievements in this novel. Her voice’s eloquence and wit sets her up as a master-storyteller, giving full vent to Williams’ own skill as a wordsmith, all the while steadily building the poignant image of a loss-ridden girl facing up to her own mortality, by writing meaning into the past. This is a story about storytelling, and in Ruth, Williams creates an ideal vessel for this exploration.

History of the Rain is so deftly told, so well-woven that as a reader you feel you are being carried along by it, nudged in the right direction by timely hints. While every precisely crafted sentence demands attention, all are subsumed into an ebb and flow of narrative development that seems to mirror the story’s central metaphor: the river. Such moments of unity between form and content lend a sense of timelessness and universality, despite its specificity of time and place. If there is fault to be found, it could only be in the sheer density of each phrasal composition; there is at times just a bit too much going on. However, the polish, depth and completeness of History of the Rain makes it a love-letter to the art of storytelling, a self-reflexive testament to the value of books, and in itself a deeply affecting read.