Author Description

A grieving woman finds solace in the rugged beauty of Ireland’s Atlantic coast in this “elegiac tale of loss and valediction” (Guardian, UK). Newly widowed, Martha Cassidy has returned to a remote cottage in a nearly abandoned village on the west coast of Ireland. There, she reflects on another loss in her life: that of her ten-year-old son, Bruno, who met an untimely death twenty years earlier. Alone on the windswept headland, Martha searches for a way forward beyond grief. But she finds herself drawn into a standoff between the successful hotel developer Eugene Riordan and an elderly local hill farmer Paddy O’Connell. As the crisis between these men escalates and Paddy suspiciously ends up in the hospital, Martha encounters Colm, a talented but much younger musician and poet—roughly the same age that Bruno would have been if he’d lived. Caught between her history and future, and that of a rapidly changing Ireland, Martha is beset with choices that will alter her life forever. In in richly poetic language, Rainsongs conjures the remote Irish coastline as well as the inner landscapes of its characters. It moves effortlessly between the lives of people and the life of the terrain, between the forces that shape character and those that shape the world.