Small Rain

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.