From a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer comes an exuberant memoir of
personal loss and longing, and finding connection on the remote Azorean
Islands of the Atlantic Ocean.
Reporter Diana Marcum is in crisis. A long-buried personal sadness is
enfolding her--and her career is stalled--when she stumbles upon an
unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them
on their annual return to the remote Azorean Islands in the Atlantic
Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and
the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep
that the Portuguese word for it can't be fully translated.
Years later, California is in a terrible drought, the wildfires seem to
never end, and Diana finds herself still dreaming of those islands and
the chuva--a rain so soft you don't notice when it begins or ends.
With her troublesome Labrador retriever, Murphy, in tow, Diana returns
to the islands of her dreams only to discover that there are still
things she longs for--and one of them may be a most unexpected love.
An Amazon Charts Most Read book.