Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
A classic . . . I'll be rereading it the rest of my life' - Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
'I just didn't put it down' - Miranda July, author of All Fours
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.
'Exquisite' - Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
'Fundamentally about the beauty of life' - Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
'A fierce, beautiful novel' - Sarah Moss, author of Ripeness
'Beautiful, evocative' - The Times
Autorentext
Garth Greenwell is the author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His third novel, Small Rain, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His critical writing appears widely, and he writes regularly about culture for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.