Francesca Peacock

Life’s little graces: Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed

An unnamed narrator, confined to hospital with a torn aorta, reminisces about his past life in Bulgaria, his love of poetry and the happy domesticity he shared with his partner

Garth Greenwell. [Alamy] 
issue 05 October 2024

Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’.

But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like ‘someone had plunged a hand into my gut and grabbed hold and yanked’.

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