Niall Williams ' Four Letters of Love '

A pure love story by Irish author Niall Williams. I felt myself emerged in the beautiful discription of the Irish countryside, rough seas and cold winters.

The story starts when the 'hero' Nicholas Coughlan is 12 years old and his civil servant father gives up his career for his real passion, painting. He is unable to sell pictures, and inspiration is not always easy coming. He is leaving is wife for several months to go to the seaside to paint.Eventually, being lonely and penniless becomes too much for Nicholas' mother and she suicides. Now father and son are on their own. His father takes him to one of his 'painting trips' to the seaside, but many of the pictures painted get destroyed by cows as they return. Eventually, a fire in their house destroys all pictures and his father dies. Only one of his pictures survives which has been given some time ago as a price to a poet living on the West Coast. Nicholas sets out to track down the poet to ask him for that picture.

The second story evolves around the heroine, Isabel Gore. Isabel is the daughter of above said poet. She had to cope with her disabled brother. he had suffered a fit in Isabel's presence when both were young children, and is unable to speak or move to greatly ever since. Isabel gets send to a convent, and escapes the convent by entering into a marriage to a local rough, a tweed dealer whom she has no real feelings for.

Of course, this is a love story, and the paths of Nicholas and Isabel will cross as Nicholas tracks down Isabel's father as the person who had been given his late father's painting. but Isabel is married. Will they or won't they. Well, if you ever read romance novels you'll know.