Small Rain

Greenwell's first two books, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, each made my year-end top 10, and this third one is likely to as well. Those earlier books were both disarmingly frank (and often breathtakingly beautiful) accounts of desire, seen through the eyes of a young gay American man in Bulgaria. In this new one the setting has shifted—to Iowa City—and the subject has too, to an aspect of the body equally autobiographical and nearly as unspoken: the vulnerability of sudden illness and the intimacy of medical care. The story is almost artless in its structure, following, with some digressions, the ten days of its narrator's hospitalization in close clinical detail, but full of art in its close attention to the body, to life and near-death, to the transcendence and the banality of everyday love. A beauty once again.
[I listened to the audiobook of Small Rain, read wonderfully by the author, via our partners at