Four Letters of Love

Critical Praise

"A delicate and graceful love story... formed with unusual authority and grace... filled with marvelous characters, large and small, all depicted with an understated veracity."
-New York Times Book Review

"Elegiac... a canvas to step back from and rejoice in."
-Chicago Tribune

"A powerful portrait of tragedy and the redemption offered by love.... A remarkable first novel....Spellbinding. Brilliant.">br> -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Rolls with courage and clarity towards a breathtaking affirmation of magic, miracles, and the power of human love. Read it, and believe in angels."
-The Times (London)

"Sparkling, lyrical, and touching....Two stories proceed side by side and eventually merge in a dazzling display of emotional and literary pyrotechnics."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A wonderful story of magic realism, a story about LOVE."
-Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist

"Two stories meet and blend beautifully in Williams' lyrical, dreamy first novel ... a meditation on the love, both sacred and profane, that shapes us."
-Library Journal (starred review)

"A wise and beautiful book, a mosaic of loves lost and regained."
-Edna O'Brien

"The unknowable puzzle of love...is Williams' theme, and the source of the novel's many wonders and surprises."
-San Antonio Express-News

"Lyrical, romantic, and moving...a tale of grief, powerful love, and words left unspoken."
-Redbook

"Astonishing....The beauty of it may fill your eyes with tears....It takes your breath away, and seizes your heart..."
-Men's Journal

"Williams pits the natural vs. the supernatural in a way that seems to make perfect sense when love, penance, and redemption are currents in the undertow."
-Boston Globe

"Magical...inspired...."
-Pittsburgh Tribune Review

"A splendid, lyrical, moving novel."
-Evening Standard

"A sophisticated, literary love story."
-Memphis Commercial Appeal

"No face of love is left unseen in this stunning fiction debut.... Played against a backdrop of capricious Irish weather, Four Letters of Love is a novel to celebrate. It is a sumptuous attestation of life and love."
-Arkansas Democrat Gazette

"Lyrical as the lilt of Gaelic, yet stormy as the Irish seas in winter, Dublin playwright Niall Williams' first novel, Four Letters of Love, is hypnotically beautiful, a tale to be savored for its telling as much as for its unusual turns of plot."
-Anniston Star

"I never thought I would find such an honorable and well-written book about love and truth, men and women, heart and despair-Four Letters of Love is a joy, an acutely evocative and sexual story...and my God, I couldn't put it down."
-Marianne Faithfull