Small Rain
“An exquisite addition to the literature of illness . . . Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book.” ―Meghan O’Rourke, Yale Review
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
A New York Public Library Top Ten Book of 2024
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, Publishers Weekly, The New Statesman, Kirkus, Vulture, Vox, BookPage, and the Chicago Public Library.
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.
Cleanness
“Compassion, that supreme quality in a fiction writer, is a main source of Greenwell’s power.” — Sigrid Nunez, The New York Review of Books
Longlisted for the Prix Sade 2021, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, & the Gordon Burn Prize
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
A New York Times Critics Top Ten Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by over 30 Publications, including The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBC
In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval. Soviet buildings crumble, wind scatters sand from the far south, and political protesters flood the streets with song.
In this atmosphere of disquiet, an American teacher navigates a life transformed by the discovery and loss of love. As he prepares to leave the place he’s come to call home, he grapples with the intimate encounters that have marked his years abroad, each bearing uncanny reminders of his past. A queer student’s confession recalls his own first love, a stranger’s seduction devolves into paternal sadism, and a romance with another foreigner opens, and heals, old wounds. Each echo reveals startling insights about what it means to seek connection: with those we love, with the places we inhabit, and with our own fugitive selves.
Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.
What Belongs to You
"The best first novel I've read in a generation"
―Andrew Solomon, The Guardian Best Books of 2016
Winner of the British Book Award for Debut of the Year
Longlisted for the National Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award
Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Lambda Literary Award
Shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A New York Times Critics Top 10 Book of 2016
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2016
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by More Than Fifty Publications, Including: The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), GQ, The Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Slate, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (London), The Telegraph (London), The Evening Standard (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Millions, BuzzFeed, The New Republic (Best Debuts of the Year), and Kirkus Reviews.
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.