Rainsongs

Martha Cassidy returns to a remote cottage in a virtually abandoned village on the west coast of Ireland for reasons that are unclear even to her. Alone on the windswept headland, surrounded by miles of cold sea, the past closes in.

She recalls the losses in her life: Brendan, her itinerant husband and charming curator, and her ten-year-old son, Bruno, who met an untimely death twenty years earlier. As the days unfold, she finds herself drawn into a standoff between the entrepreneur Eugene Riordan and local hill farmer Paddy O Connell. As the tension between them builds to a crisis, 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. Caught between its history and its future, the Celtic Tiger reels with change, and Martha faces choices that will change her life forever.

Rainsonga conjures the rugged beauty of County Kerry s coastline and the inner landscapes of its characters in richly poetic and painterly language, moving effortlessly between the lives of people and the life of the terrain. It unfolds as a compelling tale of grief, art, and the fragile, quiet ways in which time and place can offer a measure of redemption.

***PRAISE FOR RAINSONGS***

'An elegiac story of loss and valediction... Woolfian echoes and quotations pulse through Rainsongs, haunting the reader with the ubiquity of mother love and longing.' The Guardian

'A beautifully-written meditation on love, loss and grief... all three reverberate throughout this erudite book, which maps the physical, emotional and cultural landscape of West Kerry.' Irish Independent

'Ambitious and heartfelt... brings a poet s lyric gift to a compelling story.' Shena Mackay

'A beautifully-written and evocative novel about grief and greed, art and life, isolation and emotion.' Amanda Craig

'A lyrical evocation of Ireland's fragile, ancient coastline reveals a poet's sensibility. This multi-layered story of love and loss, of a woman 'erased by grief', who finds solace in the heart of a community that is threatened from within, is exceptionally moving. This book will stay with you.' Eleanor Fitzsimons

'A wool-soaked odyssey... I could feel and smell the rain all the way through, and when the sun broke in now and then, I felt that too.' The Irish Times

'A gently absorbing novel... wistful but never morose - tugging the heartstrings without milking the double bereavement at the novel s heart.' Daily Mail

'Has a unique and beautiful emotive quality that shines through its delicately constructed prose... it is in its traversal of the shaky balance between solitude and loneliness that it finds its unique voice, and champions the role of literature in an increasingly disconnected modern world.' London Magazine

'For her keen and gracious insights into the relentless grieving process, for her transcendent evocation of the rough charm and enduring splendor of Ireland s rural treasures, Hubbard deserves a place in the literary pantheon near Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, and William Trevor.' Carol Haggas, American Library Association