Book description
Francis Foley is a proud, stubborn man, and cannot stand to be beholden
to anyone. Quick to anger and slow to forgiveness, it is his temper
that, one day, costs his sons their home -- and their mother. This will
not be the last of their losses however: as the four boys and their
father embark on an odyssey to find untenanted land they can call their
own, their already diminished family is divided still further. But if a
combination of choice and chance cause the five to separate and scatter,
each to their own road, then a series of casual encounters and
coincidences offer some hope for reunion and -- in Francis's case --
redemption. Set in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, The Fall of
Light traces the footsteps of the five Foley men. With elegant, elegiac
prose, Niall Williams guides his characters -- and his readers --
through hazard and hardship, friendship, love and death, through to
Europe, America and Africa . . . and home again.
