After her little sister Emily falls to her death from the watchtower on the day she was supposed to be looking after her, Grace can never overcome her guilt. A novel about a world of adult self-indulgence and the consequences of careless decisions and dishonest compromises.

Grace struggles to overcome her guilt at her little sister Emily falling to her death while she was supposedly under Grace's supervision, with this having occurred in a climate defined by her father's advocacy of a simpler life through his writing, but with his absence often leaving the family in circumstances closer to poverty than freedom. William Wall was the 2016 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

Symphonic in form but written with classical simplicity, Grace's Day is a novel about love and loss, the natural world, and the violent complications of family life. As the great John McGahern used to say, there's verse, and there's prose, and then there's poetry; William Wall is a poet in both mediums' John Banville, Irish Independent, Books of the Year.