I am hopelessly in love with this author's books. His words transport me to Ireland and touch my heart and soul. My love affair started with History of the Rain about a chronically ill Irish girl reading through her deceased father's library and continued with This Is Happiness, the coming-of-age story of Noah, living in the 1950s with his grandparents in County Clare. The Fall of Light goes back in time to the mid-19th century to the Irish Potato Famine which killed over a million people in a 10-year period. To say times were hard is an understatement.

Like many families, the Foleys left their home to find work and food. As in the other books by Williams I've read, the rain is almost another character: "It fell as arrows of rain, the hard cold rain that announced winter and told the animals in their hidden places that the season had turned. It did not pour down, but seemed a stuff of thin metal that fell piercingly and killed the light of morning." (42) The elements are harsh. The River Shannon takes away their father so now the four young men are "orphans" missing both a mother and father. Teige is the youngest at age 12. The gypsies who rescue them discover quickly that he has a sixth sense for horses. This is mostly Teige's story as the brothers drift away, some to different continents, including North America. The separation of family is one of the strongest themes of the book. I enjoyed the different story lines of their travels, but it was the writing that moved me almost as much as the encompassing love of this family that had lost everything but their memories of happier times. ( )

I loved this tale of a family torn apart during the years of the potato famine in Ireland. Francis Foley is so disheartened with his inability to progress in life, working for an absentee landlord, with no acknowledgement for his efforts, he decides it is time to leave the only stable home he and his family have known. Following an altercation with his wife, where she walks away, Francis decides to steal the landlords telescope and set fire to the home, taking his four sons with him. Trying to escape capture they endeavour to cross a river, where he becomes separated from his sons. The four sons try to search for their father but to no avail. In the ensuing years the brothers become separated against the background of the potato famine.
The writer evokes the terrible loss of life and suffering of the not only this family but the people of Ireland with the use of beautiful prose.e.g. ' They did not know what lay ahead of them. Swollen puffs of grey and purple hung like resentments above the river. The dawn did not so much rise as ache sourly into the air, its grim clouds growing imperceptibly by the moment. The light was thin and weak and without hope.' I realised during the reading of this book that my own great grandparents would have suffered through these years and it was the impetus for them to emigrate to New Zealand. ( )

I loved the word craft - the images and the ideas for descriptions. The story of the Foley family members and Ireland was interesting too. ( )

A sprawling epic family story, this is an ambitious microcosm of the experiences of the rural Irish and their diaspora in the mid nineteenth century. Parts of the book deal unflinchingly with the horrors and iniquities of the potato famine, but Williams is too much of a romantic to allow this to dominate.

Much of the story is more folk tale than plausible narrative, and to some extent this feels like an exploration into the evolution and exaggerations of family stories. As in all of Williams' work, much of the writing is lyrical and poetic, even if the story's many digressions can be exasperating and the characters seem to contribute much to their own misfortunes. ( )

Although I admit it took me just a bit of time to get used to the author's style of sometimes convoluted sentence structure, I could hardly put this story down.

After a fight with this wife, Francis Foley steals a telescope and leaves his Irish home with his four sons. The four sons are then scattered after they think their father has drowned while attempting to cross the Shannon River. The story of each son is remarkable in that each finds himself following a separate road yet never forgetting the others in the family. The father's search for the boys seems to provide a sense of magnetism which draws them all to seek each other.

Each son has a different story and all are followed to one extent or another throughout the book. Although the story of Teige, the youngest son, takes most of the story, the life of Finbar who follows the gypsies is especially well told. The author takes the reader from Ireland across Europe and across the Atlantic to the wide west of America. The potato famine, immigration to America, and the exploration of the West all provide backgrounds for the telling of the Foley boys' stories.

As I read this book, I couldn't help but think of my own ancestors as they traveled from Europe, some to the US and some to New Zealand. Although not Irish, I'm sure each family member left home with his or her own set of troubles and hopes. sometimes conscious decisions were made and other times they were just swept along by circumstances. The road has not been straight as so well described by the Foley family. Highly recommend this book for anyone who has ever wondered about how their own family has fit into the history of the time. ( )