The Rain Before it Falls - Softcover

Coe, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141033215 ISBN 13: 9780141033211

Publisher: Penguin, 2008

Synopsis

The Rain Before it Falls - Jonathan Coe's heartbreaking novel of family secrets

Deeply moving and compelling, The Rain Before it Falls is the story of three generations of one family riven by tragedy. When Rosamund, a reluctant bearer of family secrets, dies suddenly, a mystery is left for her niece Gill to unravel. Some photograph albums and tapes point towards a blind girl named Imogen whom no one has seen in twenty years. The search for Imogen and the truth of her inheritance becomes a shocking story of mothers and daughters and of how sadness, like a musical refrain, may haunt us down the years.

'Spectacular, heartbreaking, beautifully written. Rosamund's story is one of the most extraordinary and compelling you will ever read. Impossible to put down, I loved every minute of it' Sunday Express

'A sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters' Guardian

'Entirely compelling...the plot will keep you rapt...reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most effective' New Statesman

Jonathan Coe's novels are filled with moving, astute observations of life and love, and are written with a revealing honesty that has captivated a generation of readers. His other titles, The Accidental Woman, The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse prize), The Closed Circle, The Dwarves of Death, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, The House of Sleep (winner of the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger), A Touch of Love, and What a Carve Up! (winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), are all available in Penguin paperback.

About this title

Review:

A hauntingly melancholy tale of love and loss...a moving exploration of the inheritance of unhappiness, and the devestating consequences it can have for future generations (Daily Mail)

Potent and melancholy, like a short, sad song (The Guardian)

A male writer who can enter such traditionally female territory and aquit himself with such aplomb (The Sunday Telegraph)

Synopsis:

'What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you'. Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up mysteriously at her party all those years ago. This is a story of generations, of the relationships within a family - and of what goes to make a child. Called 'the best English novelist of his generation' by Nick Hornby, Jonathan Coe extends his range in this magnificent account of a Shropshire family in the last half of the twentieth century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0141033215
• ISBN 13: 9780141033211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288