When It Rains

Description

"My body, suddenly, carries two stories of loss...One is easy for people to recognise. My mother died of cancer. I watched her age twenty-five 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." When Maggie's vibrant young husband, father to a five-year-old daughter and an unborn son, dies tragically, 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 the family farm in central western New South Wales to take stock and catch a breath. 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. When It Rains is a meditation on grief and the vagaries of the human condition, and a stunning memoir about piecing back together a life, and moving forward, one step at a time.

Maggie MacKellar was born in 1973. She has published two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada. She now lives in central western New South Wales with her two children.

An unforgettable story of love and courage that inspires even as it breaks your heart. --Susan Duncan An amazingly honest treatise not only on grief, but on human condition. --Canberra Times Maggie MacKellar explores the landscape of pain bravely and with great effect. --Age Succeeds masterfully. --Australian Book Review The conviction in the power of hope and love found in this deeply moving memoir mustn't be missed. --Woman's Day Wrenching and eloquent. --Sydney Morning Herald