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Published Mar 2008
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Following The Rotters’ Club and its sequel, The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe now offers his first stand-alone novel in a decade, a story of three generations of women whose destinies reach from the English countryside in World War II to London, Toronto, and southern France at the turn of the new century.
Evacuated to Shropshire during the Blitz, eight-year-old Rosamond forged a bond with her cousin Beatrix that augured the most treasured and devastating moments of her life. She recorded these memories sixty years later, just before her death, on cassettes she bequeathed to a woman she hadn't seen in decades. When her beloved niece, Gill, plays the tapes in hopes of locating this unwitting heir, she instead hears a family saga swathed in promise and betrayal: the story of how Beatrix, starved of her mother's affection, conceived a fraught bloodline that culminated in heart-stopping tragedy—its chief victim being her own granddaughter. And as Rosamond explores the ties that bound these generations together and shaped her experience all along, Gill grows increasingly haunted by how profoundly her own recollections—not to mention the love she feels for her grown daughters, listening alongside her—are linked to generations of women she never knew.
"Starred Review. Through relatively narrow lives on a narrow isle, Coe articulates a fierce, emotional current whose sweep catches the reader and doesn't let go until the very end." - Publishers Weekly.
"The Closed Circle and The Rotters' Club were good, solid, well-built novels .... The Rain Before It Falls is a work of maturity. On the level of the sentence Coe writes musically, rhythmically, and with restraint." - The Telegraph, Ian Sansom (UK).
"The Rain Before It Falls is brief, potent and melancholy, like a short sad song. Perhaps something from the Smiths." - The Guardian (UK).
"This tonal unsteadiness wouldn’t matter so much if we heard anyone else speak, but Rosamund’s voice is pretty much all we have. Which means, as she might put it herself, that its authenticity and veracity matter terribly. Coe has escaped the constraints of comedy only to impose an unforgivingly restrictive structure on himself. He would make a wonderful straight man if he could just, paradoxically, allow himself to let go." - The Times (UK).
"The self-righteous heroine, simmering with genteel indignation at flightier women who break the rules, is reminiscent of an Anita Brookner character. But hats off to a male writer who can enter such traditionally female territory and acquit himself with aplomb." - The Telegraph (UK), David Robson.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Copyright Viking Publishing.
Jonathan Coe was born in 1961 in Lickey, a suburb of south-west Birmingham. His first novel, The Accidental Woman was published in 1987. His best-selling novels include What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club (2001). He is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including both Costa Novel of the Year and Prix du Livre Européen. He won France's Prix Médicis for The House of Sleep and Italy's Premio Flaiano and Premio Bauer-Ca' Foscari.
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