Small Rain

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.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A NewYork Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by more than fifty publications in nine countries, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The NewYorker, The Paris Review, and A Public Space, and he has written nonfiction for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s Magazine. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in New York City.