Rainsongs is a novel about memory, faith and love, a compelling story freighted with heartbreak and loss (Shena Mackay), and a meditation on the fragile, improbable ways that history, landscape and unlikely intimacies can offer quiet redemption. Newly widowed Martha Cassidy has returned to a remote cottage on the west coast of Ireland to a virtually abandoned village. Looking out her window towards the Skelligs, Martha recalls her ten-year-old son, Bruno, before his untimely death twenty years earlier. As the days unfold, she finds herself drawn into a standoff between the entrepreneur Eugene Riorden and a local hill farmer, the elderly Paddy O 'Connell. As the crisis between these men escalates and Paddy suspiciously ends up in hospital, Martha develops a relationship with Colm, a talented but much younger musician and poet, roughly the same age that Bruno would have been if he 'd lived. As the Celtic Tiger is reeling with change from the rhythms of an older way of life to unprecedented prosperity, Martha is beset with choices that will change her life forever.
