
Small Rain
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Garth Greenwell
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By:
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Garth Greenwell
About this listen
"Garth Greenwell's superb narration makes a powerful case for authors reading their own work...there's an open tenderness in Greenwell's voice that's immediately compelling"—AudioFile on Cleanness
This program is read by the author.
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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Long-listed, CPL: Chicago Public Library Best of the Best, 2024
Long-listed, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2024
Long-listed, NYPL Best Books of the Year, 2024
Long-listed, Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year, 2024
PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, 2024
National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, 2024
Long-listed, Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2024
Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2024
©2024 Garth Greenwell (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“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
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It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon—handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction—takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him—and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.
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Engaging, smart and witty storytelling!
- By Bruce Cannella on 09-30-24
By: Thomas Grattan
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Bad Habit
- A Novel
- By: Alana S. Portero, Mara Faye Lethem - translator
- Narrated by: Alexandra Grey
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant narrator, Bad Habit casts a trans woman’s trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, Alana S. Portero’s protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes–the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the '80s and '90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city's night scene– she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, herself.
By: Alana S. Portero, and others
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Devil Is Fine
- A Novel
- By: John Vercher
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Reeling from the sudden death of his teenage son, our narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of immediately selling the land. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is much more than he can process in the throes of grief. As a biracial Black man struggling with the many facets of his identity, he’s now the owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.
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Mesmerizing
- By Gina Middleton on 06-24-24
By: John Vercher
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Bright I Burn
- A Novel
- By: Molly Aitken
- Narrated by: Avena Mansergh-Wallace
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Alice, the daughter of a wealthy innkeeper in Kilkenny, grows up watching her mother wither under the constraints of family responsibilities—and she vows that she will never suffer the same fate. In time, she discovers she has a flair for making money, and takes her father's flourishing business to new heights. But as her riches and stature grow, so too do rumors about her private life. By the time she marries her fourth husband—the three earlier are dead—a storm of local gossip and resentment culminates in a life-threatening accusation.
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Amazing
- By cynthia s. on 02-27-25
By: Molly Aitken
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The Emperor of Gladness
- A Novel
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: James Aaron Oh
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak.
By: Ocean Vuong
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The Hypocrite
- A Novel
- By: Jo Hamya
- Narrated by: Claire Kinson
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them.
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Consistently boring
- By lifelong learner on 10-09-24
By: Jo Hamya
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Our Evenings
- A Novel
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Prasanna Puwanarajah
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
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Sublime Collaboration
- By Phip Herrick on 11-20-24
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Rejection
- Fiction
- By: Tony Tulathimutte
- Narrated by: Micky Shiloah, Allyson Ryan, Quincy Surasmith, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
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Trigger warning for one chapter, otherwise really creative
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-24
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Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
- By: Katherine Bucknell
- Narrated by: Katherine Bucknell
- Length: 42 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years painted his death portrait. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness.
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Praiseworthy
- By: Alexis Wright
- Narrated by: Jacqui Katona
- Length: 36 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide.
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Beautiful, powerful book full of poetry
- By Guy on 11-11-24
By: Alexis Wright
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The History of Sound
- Stories
- By: Ben Shattuck
- Narrated by: Ben Shattuck, Zachary Chastain, Paul Mescal, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.
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Gorgeous written connected stories
- By Briana R. on 07-22-24
By: Ben Shattuck
What listeners say about Small Rain
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andre
- 09-21-24
I’m glad I read the prequel
I loved this book and lived it. From experience, I knew how and why this unnamed character felt the way he did being trapped in a hospital for days with an ailment during the Covid pandemic. The language is poetic, aching. I was left on the edge of my seat wondering if the hospital was going to discharge him. A fine book and conclusion of this series. I highly recommend it.
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- jask50
- 12-08-24
Worth Getting Through
Although my first impression was Winnie the Pooh (the voice) is gay and has a medical emergency, I was drawn in and felt a bit of privilege about being trusted with the intimate details of the illness and the author’s life. The medical aspect was interesting, but the impact on a life as a whole made me lean into this story and want an explanation of the illness and what the narrator could expect in the future. But with real life, nothing is ever that neat.
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- Deborah Williams
- 12-20-24
Small Rain
I loved the deep emotions, the doubts, the exploring, the wonder, and questions. The author was definitely the only person who could have conveyed these feelings. The perfect reader. I totally loved the book. It was a book club choice. I listened to it twice!
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- John Rollin
- 04-29-25
Excellent
Beautiful passages and imagery throughout. Great reflections on poetry, and medicine, and life and attention.
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- Herluf Kanstrup
- 09-22-24
A Masterpiece
As a senior gay man who has been both patient and care giver, this book hit very close to the bone. The descriptions of the internal meanderings of the mind as one lay in pain, helpless but coherent, is both very true and amusing by its very veracity. My only complaint is that it ended.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-09-24
A beautiful portrait of sudden illness
A unique perspective from a poet who has a sudden medical emergency and that results in an ICU stay during COVID times. The narrative drifts from detailed descriptions of each medical decision and larger philosophical and biographical stories. It made me consider the preciousness of my own health and how the standard of care we receive in medical settings can make such a difference in quality of life.
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- Orville
- 09-07-24
Perfection
Unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Delicate attention to every detail and interaction. Beautiful prose from the POV of a poet whose life is threatened by a failing body. Read so earnestly. I will never forget this book.
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- rkc
- 01-19-25
The passion of the author/reader is the best there is.
This is a perfect book to listen to. The description didn’t seem interesting but it really was. It was so descriptive and passionate. It was enthralling. Highly recommend.
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- ILAN COHEN
- 10-10-24
Don’t
Not what one comes to expect from Gareth ..
I get the jest - but the experiment failed to take off ..
I rarely ever post reviews specially not neg ones - but I felt hmmmm it’s a queer trap - not fair ..
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