Jenan Taylor
17 December 2025
Niall Williams. Time of the Child. Bloomsbury, 2024.
Time of the Child tells the story of a small, ordinary community and the goodness that abounds in the lives within it.
It is Christmas 1962, and in the rural village of Faha, Ireland, an abandoned baby, close to death, is found and brought to the clinic of village doctor, widower Dr Jack Troy. What happens next changes his life, that of his daughter, Ronnie, and indeed many others in Faha.
Jack and Ronnie are dutiful and respected, and their General Practice, located in their house, bustles with the comings and goings of Faha’s ill and anguished.
Despite their busyness and the esteem with which they are held, the doctor and his daughter live isolated by their inner lives, and after attending church, “On wet Sunday afternoons in December the old house took on the air of a ghost ship, adrift.”
Jack has sunk into melancholy, having concluded that, after all the suffering he treats daily, God perhaps does not love humanity as much as the Church claims.
He sinks further when he realises that because of his dutifulness he has lost the love of his life and the opportunity to truly be happy. He sees Ronnie, despite her beauty and youth, upholding her responsibility to stay with her father when her other siblings have left, and taking on the tasks of managing the general practice as her mother had – and becomes fixated on preventing his fate from becoming hers.
The arrival of the infant, whom they nurse back to life, brings colour back to the household, and the doctor and his daughter develop a deep, restorative love and attachment to this secret child. But how are they to hold on to this gift if the state and indeed the Church finds out?
Faha is humble and commonplace. It is so ordinary that in the early 1960s electricity has only just reached the village, and most of its people are resigned to marginal living. Yet there is something of the fable about it. Author Niall Williams draws Faha as a character in its own right. The rain-soaked town is where the reader also meets young Ruth Swain in The History of the Rain, and Noel Crowe in This is Happiness.
There is no need to have read the other books because each are stand-alone novels. I dare say though that whichever the reader enters first, they’d probably find themselves eager to know more about Faha and all the protagonists Williams has created.
There is tenderness to the way he writes his characters, even the ones who make you laugh out loud, or those whom you might be prone to despise. All fiction writers can be something like God, in that they breathe life into the people they sketch, but in the case of Williams there’s a sense he loves them dearly.
Williams admitted to literary magazine Pangyrus that he wants readers to “settle into the armchair of the narrative voice, to live inside the story, and outside of real time …”
Time of the Child does this. It’s the kind of book readers might want to wait for the right time to relish – like Boxing Day (as I did) when everyone has gone off to the shops or taken themselves to the cricket – just so they can be left alone to lose themselves in the finely drawn world, and exquisite language.
For me, it was a spiritual treat. I hope it will be for you too.
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