A baby is abandoned outside a church in this compelling tale of love and moral crisis in 1960s rural Ireland

With his new novel, Niall Williams has created perhaps the most successful work of his career. Recalling Thomas Hardy in its deeply compassionate unravelling of moral crises set in the culture of the writer’s childhood rather than the reader’s present day – a time with a seemingly closer, more constricting relationship to moral absolutes and forbidden emotion – Time of the Child is a compellingly emotional experience that catches the breath and doesn’t let up until it reaches its final, dramatic conclusion.

The setting is the town of Faha in Ireland in 1962 – “a parish that had the character of the bottom of a pocket” (a wonderfully evocative description for anyone who has walked all day in a damp raincoat). It’s a place where “nothing ever happens”, and the same things keep on happening for ever. The first of two main protagonists, Dr Jack Troy, has been the local GP for long enough to see old illnesses surfacing in the children and grandchildren of his former patients, a heredity that causes him to reflect that “since human beings stood upright, nothing was ever really cured”. Faha is described as one of those places where “it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha, on Sunday morning, you could see the needles”. So far, so familiar: a book bearing all the tropes of rural Irish writing.