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 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!