Small Rain

Small Rain reads like the work of a born novelist * Financial Times *Brilliantly evoked … it illuminates the complex realities of a body in pain – and what it is like to live with the uncertainty of it’ * The Times *A welcome call to action – to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew * TLS *Greenwell’s best book * Daily Mail *A quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details * The Spectator *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 * The Observer *A novel of blazing universality and grace * New York Magazine *Acutely observed and sensitively embodied * Vanity Fair *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 FarA 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 * Psychology Today *Writing about pain instead of desire, Greenwell continues to probe the ineffable … A priest of perception, his works are endlessly invested in recording * The Boston Globe *My book of the year … Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read – John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped PyjamasSmall 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 IslandA fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy – Sarah Moss, author of SummerwaterI’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 MemoriamGreenwell 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 IntimaciesExquisite … Utterly mesmerising – Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-TimeGreenwell 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 LusterSmall 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 RedeploymentAn exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love … An utter triumph of expression * The Bookseller *I just didn’t put it down … very romantic, incredibly moving – Miranda JulyTantalizing … Greenwell – such a finely tuned, generous writer – transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life – Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewVirtuosic … cathartic and unforgettable. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work – Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThere’s an unshowy genius to Garth Greenwell’s prose that feels genuinely peerless among contemporary American novelists … Small Rain is 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!

Garth Greenwell is the author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His third novel, Small Rain, won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His critical writing appears widely, and he writes regularly about culture for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.