This is a novel about memory, faith and love, sorrow and forgiveness; a meditation on the fragile, improbable ways that history, landscape and unlikely intimacies can offer quiet redemption. Sue Hubbard is an experienced and widely-lauded poet, art critic and novelist.

The newly widowed Martha Cassidy has returned to the west coast of Ireland to sort out her late husband’s affairs at his remote holiday cottage on the edge of the Atlantic. An art dealer and writer, Brendan often went there alone to work. Little does Martha realise how this trip - her first for many years - will force her to confront other even more traumatic memories.

It is the New Year 2007 and, as Ireland is feeling the full effects of the Celtic Tiger, she finds herself drawn into a standoff between a newly moneyed Ireland and the rhythms of a much older way of life. The entrepreneur Eugene Riorden wants to buy Paddy O’Connell’s isolated farmhouse on the headland, along with part of Martha’s field, in order to build an exclusive new spa hotel with views out over the sacred Skelligs. These strange jagged rocks had, in the 6th century, been a retreat for monks seeking seclusion from the world. Slowly we learn that this out-of-the-way village was also the last place where Martha spent time with her ten-year-old son, Bruno, before his untimely death in a school accident some twenty years earlier. Bruno had been fascinated by the Skelligs and desperate to visit them, but the trip had never taken place.

Paddy suspiciously ends up in hospital and Martha develops a poignant relationship with Colm, a talented young musician and poet who is roughly the same age that Bruno would have been had he lived. After a while she realises that the only way she can avoid being pressurised by Eugene is to return to London, first asking Colm to become caretaker of the cottage.

Two summer’s later, Martha revisits Kerry to make a voyage out to the Skelligs alone. It’s a cathartic journey, one where grief is finally laid to rest. The Skelligs, echoing the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s novel, become a metaphor for longing and desire, for that which is unobtainable.

 

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic, and an early graduate of the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She has published a collection of short stories, ROTHKO’S RED , as well as two novels: DEPTH OF FIELD and GIRL IN WHITE , for the latter of which she was awarded a major Arts Council Award. She has published several collections of poetry and been the Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet, her poetry winning numerous prizes, including twice winner of the London Writer’s competition and third prize in the National Poetry Competition. As an art critic of twenty years’ standing she writes regularly for Time Out, The Independent, the New Statesman and many other leading art magazines.