Is the poetry manuscript in Katherine Bartley's hands a brilliant meditation on love and loss or is it a fraud? Hastings, on the south coast of England, and Dublin and Roundstone in Ireland share a compelling link in The View From Errisbeg. The poet Walter O'Flaherty is coming undone in Hastings, stalking his ex-girlfriend and muse, and failing to avoid his ominous double. He finds himself at a B&B presided over by John Fletcher, a man looking for answers to questions he can't remember, and his grieving daughter-in law Grace. While Walter alternates between plans for the diverting seduction of his hostess, poetry group teas, and bouts of murderously jealous paranoia, Katherine sets off from Dublin to Errisbeg Mountain to disprove the suspicions of her associate editor about the origins of O'Flaherty's latest work. To be lost, she learns, whether in a bog in the rain, or otherwise, is to be fully present.
Love, grief, memory, and poetry play their parts in this remarkable story about learning the difference between losing yourself and being unable to find your way.