Small Rain

A thrillingly gripping autobiographical novel of illness, by the acclaimed author of What Belongs To You (winner of Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards) and Cleanness .

Small Rain reads like the work of a born novelist

Brilliantly evoked . . . it illuminates the complex realities of a body in pain – and what it is like to live with the uncertainty of it'

A welcome call to action – to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew

Greenwell's best book

A quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details

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

A novel of blazing universality and grace

Acutely observed and sensitively embodied

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

'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'

Writing about pain instead of desire, Greenwell continues to probe the ineffable . . . A priest of perception, his works are endlessly invested in recording

My book of the year . . . Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read

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

A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy

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

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

Exquisite . . . Utterly mesmerising

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

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

An exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love . . . An utter triumph of expression

I just didn't put it down . . . very romantic, incredibly moving

Tantalizing . . . Greenwell – such a finely tuned, generous writer – transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life

Virtuosic . . . cathartic and unforgettable. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work

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

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.