The Rain Before it Falls - Signed - First Edition

Coe, Jonathan

ISBN 10: 0670917281 / ISBN 13: 9780670917280

Published by Viking, 2007

About this Item

First edition, first printing, hardback, signature on title page. Dust jacket in near fine condition not faded and has minimal bumping to the edges. Book in near fine condition boards clean, edges square, text block has some foxing, first few pages has dents. '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. Called "the best English novelist of his generation" by Nick Hornby, Jonathan Coe extends his range in this magnificent account of a Shropshire family in the last half of the twentieth century.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1716907038867

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Rain Before it Falls - Signed - First Edition
• Publisher: Viking
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670917281
• ISBN 13: 9780670917280
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Following "The Rotters' Club "and its sequel, "The Closed Circle, "Jonathan Coe now offers his first stand-alone novel in a decade, a story of three generations of women whose destinies reach from the English countryside in World War II to London, Toronto, and southern France at the turn of the new century.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 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.

About the Author

Jonathan Coe has received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Prix Médicis Etranger, and, for The Rotters' Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for the most original comic writing. He lives in London.