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Small Rain

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Small Rain

By: Garth Greenwell
Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
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About this listen

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

'My book of the year . . . Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read' – John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
'Marvelous: exceptionally vivid, real, and true' – Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
'Fundamentally about the beauty of life' – Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
'Exquisite. Utterly mesmerizing' - Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
'A fierce, beautiful novel' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
'Beautiful, evocative' – The Times

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.

'A classic, a dawn serenade, a little miracle of exigent joy. I'll be rereading it the rest of my life' - Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

 Biographical Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction

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Critic reviews

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 (The New Yorker, The Best Books of 2024 So Far)
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 (John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)
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 (Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island)
A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy (Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater)
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 (Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam)
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 (Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies)
Exquisite . . . Utterly mesmerising (Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)
All stars
Most relevant
Honestly it reads like a non fiction. A book about a medical emergency during the pandemic with little digressions of memories of his life. It’s a little boring. If you’re interested in medicine then you MAY enjoy it but it’s not guaranteed. The narrator sounds a little desperate as well.

Not great

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I didn't expect to like this book so much but in the end found it impossible to put down. Greenwell is the sort of writer than can make even the most banal of subjects jump off a page and what he achieves with his account of a trip to the ICU is nothing short of a miracle. It will especially appeal to anyone who has been through a traumatic time in hospital. I loved how he gives voice to all the details that fill your time there that seem monumental to the patient but are simply part of daily life for the workers. A remarkable achievement.

Compelling Read

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I can appreciate it is hard to write about illness, but this is just banal, repetitive, messy, and focuses more on the narrator’s views and judgments surrounding the CV-19 pandemic and people’s attitudes at the time, and less about the drama and horror of acute, life-changing illness

Whilst not autobiographical, GG is trying to portray his own sense and understanding of art, creativity, crisis and pain – and the language of both, and in so doing makes the voice of The Narrator his own. It doesn’t garner sympathy, nor does it ever feel that The Narrator is truly vulnerable. The threads of humility are fake, and the vulnerability exaggerated in a vain attempt to make us feel sympathy towards them

It is the constant meandering monologues about meaningless tripe that really sink it. Whilst poetic at times in its construction, overall it is facile, benign, and instantly forgettable.

Meandering monologues

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