Small Rain

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What to expect

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

'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 Times

A 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 the dysfunctional American 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!

Critics Review

Small Rain reads like the work of a born novelist
Financial Times
Brilliantly evoked . . . it illuminates the complex realities of a body in pain – and what it is like to live with the uncertainty of it'
The Times
A welcome call to action – to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew
TLS
Greenwell's best book
Daily Mail
A quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details
The Spectator
A frightening, penetrating, ultimately illuminating novel, one with a scope far beyond its 300 or so pages. Reading it you feel as though you were holding a single grain of rice in your hand which, upon examination under a microscope, reveals itself to be engraved with the history of the world
The Observer
A novel of blazing universality and grace
New York Magazine
Acutely observed and sensitively embodied
Vanity Fair
From a tale of great pain – a rare kind of story – the book becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love and ordinary happiness
The New Yorker, The Best Books of 2024 So Far
A profound read . . . insightful and masterful, Small Rain invites us to reconsider where we put emphasis, how we think about attachment, and how best to live when pain itself seems unrelenting and unavoidable
Psychology Today
Writing about pain instead of desire, Greenwell continues to probe the ineffable . . . A priest of perception, his works are endlessly invested in recording
The Boston Globe
My book of the year . . . Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read
John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true. Garth Greenwell’s sensibility is rich and generous – the narrator's memories are haunting, and his experiences of both illness and love are deeply affecting. You are in the room with him. This is a true achievement, written with engaged humanity and a great command of style
Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy
Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
I’ve never read anything that so vividly captures the helplessness of a hospital stay. Greenwell weaves moments of clear-eyed misanthropy into a novel that is fundamentally about the beauty of life. Small Rain is claustrophobic, terrifying, soaringly philosophic. It will make you notice that you are alive, which is maybe the most important thing a book can do
Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
Greenwell writes with exquisite precision about pain and loss – but his novel is equally a meditation on joy, beauty, and above all, love. Small Rain is a triumph, one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time
Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
Exquisite . . . Utterly mesmerising
Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Greenwell writes tenderly about what it is to be subject to the crises of the body. Small Rain is a document of searching, an interrogation of love, care, and time, daring in its refusal to be abstract about the concrete facts of life and death
Raven Leilani, author of Luster
Small Rain is a marvel, one of America’s greatest writers working at the top of his game, moving into new territory with force and grace and wisdom and overwhelming beauty
Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
An exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love . . . An utter triumph of expression
The Bookseller
I just didn't put it down . . . very romantic, incredibly moving
Miranda July
Tantalizing . . . Greenwell – such a finely tuned, generous writer – transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Virtuosic . . . cathartic and unforgettable. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work
Publishers Weekly, starred review
There's an unshowy genius to Garth Greenwell's prose that feels genuinely peerless among contemporary American novelists . . . Small Rain is 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!

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