Small Rain

A New Statesman Book of the Year’My book of the year . . .
Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read’ – John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’Marvelous: exceptionally vivid, real, and true’ – Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island’Fundamentally about the beauty of life’ – Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam’Exquisite. Utterly mesmerizing’ – Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’A fierce beautiful novel’ – Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater’Beautiful, evocative’ – The TimesA medical crisis brings one man close to death – and to love, art, and beauty – in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell. A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain.
The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into a dysfunctional healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value – art, memory, poetry, music, care – are thrown into sharp relief.
Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America.
Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind. ‘A classic, a dawn serenade, a little miracle of exigent joy. I’ll be rereading it the rest of my life’ – Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!