Garth Greenwell on Small Rain

We are thrilled that Garth Greenwell - award-winning author of bookseller favourites Cleanness and What Belongs to You - will be joining us in the bookshop this autumn. Small Rain is his highly anticipated new novel, about a medical crisis that brings one man close to death - but also to love, art, and beauty...

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.

‘Small Rain is a marvellous 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.’ Colm Tóibín

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

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Garth Greenwell is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.