The Rain Before it Falls cover art

The Rain Before it Falls

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Rain Before it Falls

By: Jonathan Coe
Narrated by: Jenny Agutter
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Rain Before it Falls written by Jonathan Coe, read by Jenny Agutter.

'What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.'

Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up mysteriously at her party all those years ago. This is a story of generations, of the relationships within a family - and of what goes to make a child.

 Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The People in the Photo cover art
That Mitchell and Webb Sound: The Complete Series 1-5 cover art
The Landscape of Love cover art
The Complete Short Stories cover art
The Unsettled Dust cover art
A Dark-Adapted Eye cover art
The Wine Dark Sea cover art
Cold Hand in Mine cover art
Talking to Strange Men cover art
A Fatal Inversion cover art
The End of Loneliness cover art
The Restoration of Otto Laird cover art

Critic reviews

Spectacular, heartbreaking, beautifully written. Rosamund's story is one of the most extraordinary and compelling you will ever read. Impossible to put down, I loved every minute of it

Entirely compelling . . . the plot will keep you rapt . . . reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most effective

A sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters
A hauntingly melancholy tale of love and loss...a moving exploration of the inheritance of unhappiness, and the devestating consequences it can have for future generations
Potent and melancholy, like a short, sad song
A male writer who can enter such traditionally female territory and aquit himself with such aplomb
All stars
Most relevant
No spoilers here. I like being surprised by the books and audio-books that I add to my library. My choices are very largely speculative and I avoid reading reviews in advance. ‘The Rain Before it Falls’ I selected, liking the mysterious title. That was all it took. The Jonathan Coe of ‘The Rotters' Club’ was not in evidence. What I read into was a deeply involving novel of a mystery of photographs and relationships that prompt the key narrator to explain them and most especially to describe them. It is all so sensitively done, and fundamentally affecting. After listening to the novel, you almost have false visual memories of each of the photographs, so well does Coe describe them. There are surprises, some horrors and above all the magnetic pull of the narrative. It led to my biggest surprise in the novel, which prompted the idea of an epilogue. This is not a long audio-book, belying its importance. It is performed with unfailing sensitivity, understanding and truth by Jenny Agutter. Listeners will find that the combination of performer and novel are as if made for one another. On the strength of this audio-book I bought three hard-copies to gift to friends. It is just that kind of book, that you want others to experience.

Unexpected, Rich, Involving and Rewarding

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Jenny Agutter read this evocative novel beautifully and it is a neat device for telling a story. Unfortunately the editors have jumped the recordings in such a way that some of
the chapters start immediately at the end of the previous one so there’s no chance to draw breath I think if you recording something like this you need to get it right

Editing issues

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.