The fall of light

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.