false 43856921 1868606 895807 0670917281 9780670917280 86 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179267340m/895807.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179267340s/895807.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/895807.The_Rain_Before_It_Falls 3.44 315 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.
A stirring, masterful portrait of motherhood and family secrets, The Rain Before It Falls is also a meditation on the tapestries we weave out of the past, whether transcendent or horrific. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times for his "sustained, intricate brilliance," Jonathan Coe once again proves himself "an artist of character and of his characters’ stories," here more astutely than ever before.]]> 19916 3.73 2658 333 2007 0 0 false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Jan 21 15:42:00 -0800 2009 Wed Jan 21 15:43:46 -0800 2009 STOP SMILING review of The Rain Before it Falls:

Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls is told largely in the words of the elderly Rosamund, who records the narrative on four audiocassettes while consuming a fatal dose of Valium and Scotch at her home in Shropshire, England. In...more...]]>