Regina Marler

THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS
By Jonathan Coe
Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95

A middle-aged woman named Gill arrives at the home of her recently deceased Aunt Rosamond and discovers an empty Scotch glass, an empty bottle of sedatives and a set of cassette tapes stacked near a recorder and microphone. “These are for Imogen,” says a note near the tapes. “If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.” This irresistible opening—as economic, in literary terms, as a flinch or a raised eyebrow in a comic sketch—establishes the tense, elegiac tone of Jonathan Coe’s small masterpiece, The Rain Before It Falls. A departure from the boisterous novels Mr. Coe is known for (his breakthrough was 1994’s What a Carve Up!, inanely retitled The Winshaw Legacy in America), the new novel traces the roots of a savage act through four generations of women.  read more »

You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, the antihero, the evil twin. Now meet the enigmatic heroine. Louise Forrest, the watery and tentative central figure of Susanna Moore’s The Big Girls, is a prison psychiatrist­—a master of motives whose own motives are unclear.  read more »