'A marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true' - Colm Toibin
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.
About the Author
Garth Greenwell is the author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.
Industry Reviews
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 * The 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 *