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Small Rain
This literary novel, Greenwell's third, just came out on September 3 and is featured in our 2024 Fall Book Preview. The fictional narrative is inspired by a sudden medical crisis the author suffered in the summer of 2020, the onset of which was signaled by debilitating pain that promptly landed him in the ICU wing of an Iowa hospital. In one sense, this is the story of a man who doesn't get out of bed. But it also has an expansiveness to it, because though he is laid flat by his illness, he can travel anywhere at all in his mind, and does. Thanks to a compassionate first person perspective we accompany the narrator as he is bewildered by the transpiring medical events—but also takes moments to reflect on his past, his relationships, and the meaning of his small life. Because the narrator is an artist and music lover, he also constantly thinks of books, poems, and pieces of music that he loves, and these reflections are a treat for those who share the same affinity. I read this quiet book in a single day, and expect it to land on my best-of-the-year list. A note to the sensitive reader: content warnings abound.
About the Book
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.
Other books in the "Quiet novels"
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