Rain

Description

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 was born in New Zealand and educated at Victoria University and Oxford. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Rain, which was made into a feature film. Her novels and short stories have been published in nine languages. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband and two children.