The year 1957. In the village of Fahy in County Clare, where nothing has changed for a thousand years, changes are coming. First, the rain has stopped. No one remembers when it started: the eternal rain on Ireland's west coast is a way of life. But now the local priest, Father Coffey, announces the arrival of electricity, and the clouds seem to part. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crow spends the summer in Fahy with his grandparents, and along with the harbingers of the future — the electricians — a mysterious Christy appears, bringing with him a vast universe of the past and secrets waiting to be revealed, along with lots of lively Irish music. Niall Williams masters the technique of holographic writing, where a whole cosmos fits in a grain of sand and is expressed by that same grain. Every sentence of the novel is a macrocosm of the Irish village that is itself the universe where electric wires are about to be stretched. "Here It Is, Happiness" is a funny, observant, sometimes humorous, and invariably touching homage to the serenity that one might try to create anew. It is a coming-of-age novel — of individuals and of time itself. And, of course, it is a novel about the power and influence of human stories.