The Rain Goose

A widowed mechanic moves to the islands and is drawn, against his will, into the unfinished story of a young woman who fell from the cliffs at Marwick Head in 1956 and of the small son she lost. A quiet, painterly literary ghost story set on Orkney by the Guardian Fiction Prize-winning author of The Levels.

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. It was not the first time shed done this. Her name was Bethany Buchanan.

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