Small Rain, Garth Greenwell
Small Rain, Garth Greenwell
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Small Rain
A Novel

Author: Garth Greenwell

Narrator: Garth Greenwell

Unabridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/03/2024

Synopsis

"Garth Greenwell's superb narration makes a powerful case for authors reading their own work...there's an open tenderness in Greenwell's voice that's immediately compelling" —AudioFile on Cleanness

This program is read by the author.

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 Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

About Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted 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 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike

I just LOVE Garth Greenwell! He is an expert when in it comes to turning human consciousness into language, and in "Small Rain", he ponders the experience of suddenly becoming life-threateningly ill and being stuck in a hospital. The unnamed Kentucky-born narrator and protagonist is a writer who liv......more

Goodreads review by Flo

I avoid books that have anything to do with the pandemic, but this one proved that a medical emergency during COVID can be about other things than COVID. I think it helped that I've read Garth Greenwell's previous books, and the protagonist is the same character at another point in his life. I'm not......more

Goodreads review by Jessica

This novel doesn't feel like any other novel, a very high compliment. It is strange to read a book that documents something so clearly and perfectly and realize that you cannot remember finding it in any other book or film. The something it documents is, broadly, how it feels to be in a hospital in......more

Quotes

Advance Praise

“Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“I just didn’t put it down . . . Very romantic, incredibly moving.”
—Miranda July, author of All Fours

“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

“An exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love . . . An utter triumph of expression.”
—The Bookseller

“Small Rain is a marvel, one of America’s greatest writers working at the top of his game, moving into new territory with force and grace and wisdom and overwhelming beauty.”
—Phil Klay, author of Missionaries

“Greenwell writes tenderly about what it is to be subject to the crises of the body. Small Rain is a document of searching, an interrogation of love, care, and time, daring in its refusal to be abstract about the concrete facts of life and death.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster

“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

“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 The Magician

Awards

  • CPL: Chicago Public Library Best of the Best
  • Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
  • NYPL Best Books of the Year
  • Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year
  • PEN/Faulkner Award - Nominee
  • BookPage Best Books of the Year
  • National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
  • NPR Best Book of the Year
  • PEN/Faulkner Award - Winner
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