Rain - Softcover

A twelve-year-old girl spends summers at a lake with her parents and little brother. The days are long and hot and while the parents entertain their friends the two children are left alone to play and dream and let the future come down upon them . . . This is a story of loss. Of how families come undone. How children grow up. And how by losing the one most dear you find that in the end only a kind of oblivion can comfort you. Exploring the way memory works, remembering both as a child and as an adult looking back on the child, Rain is an attempt to show the dissolving of the past. The reader is given the experience of remembering, along with the narrator, so that the story is not something told but is more like a dream, unravelling and disappearing while it is being read yet also yielding up each moment as intense, sweet, hypnotic.

Kirsty Gunn is an internationally awarded writer who published her first novel with Faber in 1994 and since then eight works of fiction, including short stories, as well as a collection of fragments and meditations, and essays. She is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee and lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters.