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.