> Skip to content
[]
Play sample
  • Published: 27 August 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241967751
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

The Rain Before it Falls




A mesmerising study of human character, now reissued to coincide with the publication of The Proof of My Innocence

'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.

  • Published: 27 August 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241967751
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

Also by Jonathan Coe

See all

Praise for The Rain Before it Falls

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

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

Guardian

A male writer who can enter such traditionally female territory and aquit himself with such aplomb

Sunday Telegraph