Shelfology Book Pairing

by Garth Greenwell

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 'My book of the year . . . Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read' – John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas 'Marvelous: exceptionally vivid, real, and true' – Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island 'Fundamentally about the beauty of life' – Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam 'Exquisite. Utterly mesmerizing' - Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 'A fierce, beautiful novel' - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater 'Beautiful, evocative' – The Times 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. 'A classic, a dawn serenade, a little miracle of exigent joy. I'll be rereading it the rest of my life' - Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

A Novel

by Tom Crewe

"In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that what they call 'inversion,' or homosexuality, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality. Though they have never met, John and Henry both live in London with their wives, Catherine and Edith, and in each marriage there is a third party: John has a lover, a working class man named Frank, and Edith spends almost as much time with her friend Angelica as she does with Henry. John and Catherine have three grown daughters and a long, settled marriage, over the course of which Catherine has tried to accept her husband's sexuality and her own role in life; Henry and Edith's marriage is intended to be a revolution in itself, an intellectual partnership that dismantles the traditional understanding of what matrimony means. Shortly before the book is to be published, Oscar Wilde is arrested. John and Henry must decide whether to go on, risking social ostracism and imprisonment, or to give up the project for their own safety and the safety of the people they love. Is this the right moment to advance their cause? Is publishing bravery or foolishness? And what price is too high to pay for a new way of living?"--