Four Letters of Love, Niall Williams ( Warner Books, 1998)***

Deemed 'A Notable Book of the Year' by New York Times, this is one of the most unusual novels I've read in some time. It is a story that hints of miracles and almost proves predestination. Seemingly unrelated events conspire to draw two young people together against all odds that they should ever have met, much less fallen in love. And the closer you are to the end of the story, the more powerfully it grips you and compels you to read on.

The story begins when an Irish civil servant quits his clerking job, which he despised, and abandons his family to go off and paint the wild Irish country and seaside because God told him that is what he should do. His wife, confused and in despair, goes insane and commits suicide. His son, Nicholas, eventually joins his father and they lead a brief but happy almost vagabond existence while his father paints. Nicholas, ironically, takes a clerk's job in the civil service. His father later becomes despondent and burns down his house, his paintings and himself, an event which inspires Nicholas to quit his job and begin a quest to recover his father's only surviving painting, which had been awarded to a poet-teacher on an island off the coast of western Ireland.

The poet has a daughter, of course, and her life has been told in a parallel story within this novel. Her younger brother had a genius for music but is silenced by a seizure which she blames herself for. That tragedy powerfully influences her own life and leads her to marry a man she does not really love. Nicholas arrives the day after her marriage and falls madly in love with her. He writes her a series of passionate love letters but each of the letters are intercepted and destroyed by the girl's mother. The situation seems hopeless. But read on...