Four Letters of Love - Tapa dura

Four Letters Of Love describes how two people set out on a journey towards each other, neither quite knowing that the journey has begun. Nicholas Coughlan is twelve, living with his parents just outside Dublin, when God speaks to his father, telling him to give up his job and devote his life to painting. The household is thrown into disarray, with Nicholas and his mother left in bitter, bemused poverty as his father sporadically disappears, obeying what he ardently believes to be God's command. Across the country, on an island off the west coast, isabel Gore lives with her family: her drunken, disappointed father; her sad but forbearing mother; and her brother, Sean, once a musical genlus but now, after a mysterious selzure, unable to walk or speak. Isable is sent away from the island, to convent school in Galway, but finding the restrictions of life with the nuns unbearable, and burdened by guilt at the fate of her brother, she takes the first opportunity to make what looks like an escape. Nicholas and Isabel were made for each other, but how will they ever know it? Four Letters Of Love is a novel about destiny, acceptance and the tragedies and miracles of everyday life. Most of all it is an unforgettable, magical story about the illuminating power of love in all its guises.

Niall Williams was born in Dublin in 1958. After graduating from University College Dublin he took up a post as Lecteur in the Universite de Caen in France. In 1980 he moved to the US where he worked in a bookshop in upstate New York and married Christine Breen, a painter. In 1985, the couple moved to Kiltumper in the west of Ireland to live in the two-hundred year old cottage that Christine's grandfather had left in 1906. Niall Williams is the author of several plays and, with Christine Breen, has written four non-fiction books about life in Kiltumper.