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.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/03/2024
Pages: 320
Weight: 1lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.38w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780374279547


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/01/2024 pg. 3
Publishers Weekly 07/15/2024
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2024

About the Author
Garth Greenwell is the author of two previous works of fiction, Cleanness and What Belongs to You. The recipient of honors including 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.