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Garth Greenwell’s Grand Romance
The author explores the tender side of long-term partnership amid a health crisis in his best novel yet.
His first novel, What Belongs to You, the story of a love affair between a young Bulgarian hustler and an expat teacher from Kentucky, was nominated for the 2016 National Book Award and will be adapted as an opera this fall. Where his first two books take Bulgaria as backdrop and a certain kind of soft-skinned, deeply feeling libertinism as narrative vehicle, Small Rain functions as a midlife sequel, one that is quietly, unabashedly romantic. Its enclosed and high-stakes choice of settings and situations — the ER and ICU during the height of COVID, the hard-won house and loving life partner, the glancing brush with death — grant the novel a blazing universality and grace.
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