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!
