She stands beside me a thousand miles away.

‘What's this book about?' I don't quite know what to say. I could say many things. I could say it's about the truth, say that it begins with family, but is about love whether love can endure in the pages of a book. I could tell her it's about how to carry on, about how if you are a storyteller you tell stories, you tell them to make some sense of all that is random and harsh and cruel in the world, but all this seems portentous and absurd…'It's a short book about love, I say.

In a cottage in County Clare , Jim Foley sits before a white screen and begins a love letter to this wife, hoping the words he writes will bring her closer to him. In the upstairs rooms of the cottage, his children, Jack and Hannah, are asleep.

Retracing the journey of Jim's life, from childhood in County Clare to early adulthood in America and eventually back to Clare again, this is a story of desire, of stolen books, missed moments and contemporary fatherhood. After half a lifetime of loss and grief, it is in language alone that Jim now places his trust; through the written word, he imagines he can express all that previously been unsaid in his life and so that love lost can be refound and restored.

Only Say the Word is a story about acceptance of the past and – as Jim begins to make a fragile peace with himself and the world around him – hope for the future. Deeply felt, beautifully told, and written in Niall Williams's lyrical, lilting prose, it is at once a novel about words, about books, about trying to make sense of grief, and a haunting, intimate testament to the enduring nature of love.

 

NIALL WILLIAMS was born 1958 and lives in Kiltumper , Ireland , with his Christine and their two children. He is the author of three other novels, including Four Letters of Love, which was sold in over twenty countries and an international bestseller.