When newly widowed Martha Cassidy returns to Ireland to sort out her husband Brendan's affairs, she has no idea that the remote cottage in an abandoned village on the edge of the Atlantic will force her to confront other more traumatic memories.
It is New Year 2007 and, as this far flung region experiences the full effects of the Celtic Tiger, she finds herself drawn into a standoff between the entrepreneur Eugene Riorden and hill farmer, Paddy O'Connell; a conflict between a new, moneyed Ireland and the rhythms of an older way of life.
Looking towards the Skelligs, sacred and strange rocks ten miles off the coast of St. Finián's Bay that had once been a retreat for monks seeking seclusion, Martha recalls her ten-year-old son, Bruno, before his untimely death in a accident twenty years earlier. As the days unfold, the crisis between Eugene and Paddy deepens and Martha develops a poignant relationship with Colm, a talented young musician and poet, roughly the age that Bruno would have been.
Returning on Midsummer's Day, two years later, Martha finally makes the trip to the Skelligs alone, but can she lay grief to rest, and can the mysterious Skelligs offer a salve to her unobtainable longing?
Rainsongs is a novel about memory, faith and love; a story of sorrow and forgiveness; and a meditation on the fragile, improbable ways that history, landscape and unlikely intimacies can offer redemption