The Rain Before It Falls - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jonathan Coe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

As a young girl, Rosamond is sent to Shropshire to escape the Blitz. Here, in the countryside, she forms a close bond with her older cousin, Beatrix, a young woman haunted by anger and resentment.

Sixty years later, just before her death, Rosamond records her memories on cassettes, addressing them to a distant cousin--a near stranger-named Imogen. As Gill, her beloved niece, listens to these tapes, a heart--stopping family saga is revealed. In this masterful portrait of three generations of woman, Jonathan Coe exposes the profound reserves of hope and loss within the lives of ordinary woman.

Review Quotes

"A profoundly moving meditation on misfired relationships, Coe's elegaic seventh novel plumbs the depths of withheld love and emotional austerity among three generations of emotionally dysfunctional women." -James Urquhart, Financial Times

"Concentrated and controlled [with] a depth of human understanding...for the admiring reader, the question may be whether The Rain Before It Falls is a diversion for Jonathan Coe, or whether it quietly announces a new direction." -Frances Taliaferro, The Washington Post Book World

"A triumph...from it's cryptically beautiful title to its subtly riveting narrative, from its amazing narrative voice to its satisfying and moving conclusion." --Timothy Peters, San Francisco Chronicle

"A novel told in a simple, decent voice is as welcome as it is rare...Absorbing, graceful and melancholy." --Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain-Dealer

"Dignified and sure...Skillfully layered and plotted." --The Atlantic Monthly

"A complex intergenerational mosaic of mothers and daughters." --The New Yorker

"Precise and considered, restrained but unblinking...[Coe's] tensest and most affecting work." --Matthew Peters, The Boston Globe

"Jonathan Coe's small masterpiece." --Regina Marler, New York Observer

"Quiet, elegiac, never straying into sentiment, [The Rain Before It Falls] is perhaps the most spare yet poetic of Coe's novels." --Anna Mundow, The Boston Globe

"Coe painstakingly builds a psychological mystery evoking the suspense and dread of books such as Ian McEwan's Atonement. This brief novel makes an emotionally overwhelming case that within ordinary women' s lives there are profound reserves of beauty and despair, crumbled hopes and the purest love." --Kyle Smith, People

"Coe articulates a fierce, emotional current whose sweep catches the reader and doesn't let go until the very end." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Jonathan Coe has received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Prix Médicis Etranger, and, for The Rotters' Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for the most original comic writing. He lives in London.