Dimensions
154 x 231 x 17mm
'My body, suddenly, carries two stories of loss. I'm heavy with them, made cumbersome and slow. One is easy for people to recognise. My mother died of cancer. I watched her age 25 years in eight weeks, My other story marks me as different. It is more silent and more savage, it is not pure and no one knows how to approach it. Somewhere I lost my husband. He slipped away from me in a whirl of fear and confusion.'
When Maggie's vibrant young husband, father to a five-year-old daughter and an unborn son, walks away from everyone he loves and kills himself, Maggie is left widowed and due to give birth three months later to their second child.
Then her beloved mother, backbone of the family, mother to three children, grandmother to two, dies suddenly of aggressive cancer. In two short years, Maggie's life has shattered.
After a year, she gives up trying to juggle single motherhood and the demands of an academic career and returns with her children to her mother's family farm in central western New South Wales to take stock and catch a breath. Here she finds light and space, and a chance at something new.
The farm becomes a redemptive, healing place for Maggie and her children as they battle the heat and drought that only the Australian landscape can offer. She throws herself into the horses, sheep, ducks and chickens and slowly, finally, realises she has found a new shape for herself.
Written in lyrical, haunting prose by a brilliant new talent, When It Rains is not only a meditation on grief and the vagaries of the human condition, it is a triumphant story of piecing back a life and a family, and moving forward, one step at a time.
