The Rain Goose

When his wife Mary dies, a retired mechanic leaves the south of England and buys a small house in Orkney. He has his birds, his walks, his memories. And then, one wild morning on the cliffs at Marwick Head, a young woman in an old-fashioned coat steps quietly off the edge in front of him. She is not the first to have done so. Her name was Bethany Buchanan. The year was 1956.


A quiet, painterly literary ghost story set against the lochs, fulmars and red-throated divers of the Orkney isles, The Rain Goose is the thirteenth novel from the Guardian Fiction Prize-winning author of The Levels, and a tender study of grief, the call of the dead, and the slow work of letting them go.