Small Rain - by Garth Greenwell (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Financial Times, New Statesman, and more
A New Yorker Recommended Read of the Year
A New York Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year

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.

Review Quotes

"Reading [Small Rain, ] 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 . . . Greenwell's protagonist is sustained by this determination to offer up work that will provide sustenance, and in giving us this vivid, generous novel, Greenwell himself has made just such an offering."
--Lauren J Joseph, The Observer

"A quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of 'pure life, ' and the wonder of paying attention to details."
--Francesca Peacock, The Spectator

"Small Rain was one of the most profound reading experiences I've ever had . . . A novel about a man stuck alone in a hospital bed should be inert, but Small Rain is anything but, a reminder of the wonder available in our individual humanities should we take the time to look and listen."
--John Warner, Chicago Tribune

"There are few authors who make me feel as alive and rooted in my body as he does . . . Greenwell's writing also adeptly captures how it feels to think. His gloriously winding sentences, in which art becomes a 'laboratory for thinking, ' are as thought-provoking as they are pleasurable."
--Ruth Madievsky, Interview Magazine

"Propulsive . . . As [the narrator] tries to understand what is happening, he bonds with one caretaker over medieval music and recoils from another's frighteningly incompetent care as we're immersed in his dazzling mind."
--Marion Winik, People

"Greenwell is a master sensualist on the page, drawing the reader into the physical experiences of the characters, whether it be a visual appreciation of a common sparrow's beauty, the soaring emotion evoked by the sound of an opera singer's voice, or even the burning pain of an IV needle shoved into a vein."
--Samantha Dunn, The Orange County Register

"At its core, Small Rain is a novel about life and death and about the need for empathy in a fragile world. Heady stuff, but Greenwell presents it beautifully in this lyrical work."
--Michael Magras, Bookpage (starred review)

"Small Rain is more than a medical chronicle. The writing regularly digresses into personal memories and meditations on art, always circling the theme of life's inherent fragility. Poetry and music have long been the disciplines that have helped the narrator 'undull' his senses to the miracle of being, and the novel's tight focus elevates the emergency into a kind of poetic happening, marked by terror and grace."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"The ethos of Small Rain . . . is to set one's head against the weather--to refuse the expedient and efficient, to insist that the only self-worth celebrating is one undone and remade, not pandered to in its narrow appetites . . . A welcome call to action--to pause and think about how art, almost alone, has the capacity to revise and renew."
--Andrew van der Vlies, Times Literary Supplement

"An affecting portrait . . . The novel crafts a portrait, both tender and abject, of life lived in close proximity to death under medical care, with art (especially poetry and music) and human connection as vitally buoying."
--Adam Eli, Cultured

"Small Rain manages--sort of incredibly, ecstatically, if you think about it--to be utterly unsentimental despite technically being an illness narrative. It is also very moving. It is not any kind of drama that makes the love story at the center of the book--because what do you do in your hospital bed except consider the love story at the center of your life--but tenderness."
--Emily Temple, Literary Hub

"Small Rain is not a book about the hospital or the medical system, however; it unfurls internally, in the consciousness of a character, a consciousness aware of itself evolving, shaped by a terrible new pain and knowledge . . . This is the real setting of Greenwell's fiction--not the hospital, the classroom, the night clubs in Sofia, but this space that exists within them, within ordinary life, a realm unlatched by those forked sentences, in which time is slowed, and a deep, receptive kind of contact with the other, with the self, is permitted to bloom."
--Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker

"An exquisite addition to the literature of illness . . . Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book."
--Meghan O'Rourke, Yale Review

"Profound . . . A paean to some of life's most meaningful pleasures . . . A daring, mysterious work that audaciously and successfully marries the physical and the metaphysical. As in all great novels, its philosophical insights are spliced with details that root the work in a specific time and place but do nothing to diminish its timelessness."
--Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post

"Prodding and prismatic in the ways it reflects our collective values of love and art in new light, Small Rain is a triumph of genuine vulnerability, crafted by an author who has already delivered some of the most memorable characters in modern fiction."
--Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

"Garth Greenwell is unafraid to depict plainly what often goes unspoken, and his third novel, Small Rain, makes glorious progress toward filling in Dickinson's blank . . . These sections cast a spell over the reader even in the most clinical moments . . . Inspiring acts of kindness and moments of mundane bureaucracy are depicted with the same tender attention . . . Small Rain's sentences transform the clinical narration of a hospital stay into the soothing murmur of a prayer, or the steady sound of rain."
--Walt Hunter, The Atlantic

"An illuminating vision of human connection and the enduring power of art. Author Garth Greenwell's lyrical prose and deep empathy shine through on every page, making Small Rain both an unforgettable story and a poignant meditation on what it means to live fully in the face of life's greatest challenges."
--Apple Books (Best of the Month)

"As we can expect from Greenwell, [Small Rain] is a complex and beautiful queer love story that tackles art, memory, and more."
-- Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya and Riese, Autostraddle

"A priest of perception, Greenwell implicitly makes a moral claim about dwelling with details--a claim that reaches its apotheosis in Small Rain . . . This kind of looking not only consecrates the ordinary world, but makes a bridge between disparate ideas, bringing them to a level plane of existence . . . Literature is powerfully linked to life. The heart of the book beats in such resonances. Lush with literary references, the novel invites still more."
--Rhoda Feng, Boston Globe

"In Garth Greenwell's acutely observed and sensitively embodied newest, a poet lies in a hospital room, afflicted by the sudden onset of an excruciating pain. Amid IVs and paper cups of pills, a series of intimate relationships unfurl."
--Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

"Throughout Small Rain, Greenwell's massing, vascular prose, arranged in paragraphs that span many pages, deftly forces the reader to slow down and concentrate. His sentences are parataxic and branching, as organic and surprising as a network of veins . . . Greenwell's great gift: finding forms for the representation of thought, much as the Impressionist painters, more than a century ago, found new forms for the representation of light . . . The novel [has] blazing universality and grace."
--Sarah Thankam Mathews, New York

"[A] great American novel . . . The best of Greenwell's writing brings to mind an overflowing container, a surfeit of emotion and insight."
--Hannah Gold, The Nation

"[A] novel about what it really means to be alive."
--Shannon Carlin, TIME

"This propulsive novel is set in the ICU, where our narrator spends 11 days for an injury to his aorta that mystifies his doctors and terrifies his partner (they were set up by colleagues as the only two gay poets in Iowa City). As he tries to understand what is happening, he bonds with one caretaker over medieval music and recoils from another's frighteningly incompetent care as we're immersed in his dazzling mind."
--People (Book of the Week)

"Art, Greenwell shows us, expands and humanizes us. How the mundane (a sparrow, a cup of coffee, an avocado-oil chip!) can be charged with meaning, 'absolute bliss.' Against a backdrop of anger and confusion--over masks and vaccines, police brutality and protests, the 'terrible slow catastrophe' of climate crisis--Small Rain asserts the astonishing beauty of life."
--Jessica Olin, Oprah Daily

"There'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!

"The virtuosic first-person narration, devoid of dialogue, places the reader front and center in the narrator's bracing account . . . serving as a palpable reminder to never take one's health for granted, and it builds to a cathartic and unforgettable conclusion. It's a luminous departure from Greenwell's spare and erotic earlier work."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Garth Greenwell is one of our best contemporary prose stylists (due in part, no doubt, to his previous life as a poet), and a new book from him is always a cause for celebration. This novel, in fact, concerns a poet, who suddenly, and with no explanation, finds himself in incredible pain. No doctors can find the source, which makes the book hum with urgency, but of course the real questions Greenwell tackles here are much more metaphysical, though no less urgent--all of the questions of life, love, time, mortality, consciousness made crystalline."
--Emily Temple, Lit Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2024)

"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

About the Author