Rainsongs by Sue Hubbard - Review by Martina Evans

From the Irish Times:

An English woman’s journey to her dead husband’s Kerry summer cottage leads to a series of discoveries.

A recently widowed English woman, Martha Cassidy, is driving in the dark, lost somewhere outside Cahirsiveen. Her husband, Brendan Cassidy, has died suddenly of a heart attack, and she is on her way to his remote summer cottage on the headland. The practical need to sort and pack up his things is clearly more than that. “Coming here forces her to accept his loss. This was always his place.”

As Martha contemplates her loneliness here at the end of the world with Skellig rock in her sight line, the medieval monks who survived on that rock symbolise faith in the face of darkness and privation. But Skellig also represents unfinished business for Martha, a trip that was never taken.