Jonathan Coe: The Rain Before It Falls
UK 2007, 278 pp., brochure, € 18.79Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.As 73-year-old Rosamond sits alone in her remote Shropshire house, her dying thoughts turn to her cousin's granddaughter, Imogen, who has been blind from an early age. Rosamond realizes that she has one last duty to perform: to describe on tape, for Imogen's benefit, a series of 20 photographs which between them tell a tragic family history. At the centre of her narrative is Imogen's grandmother, Beatrix, whose flight from her husband after the war in search of freedom and excitement left a damaging legacy: damaging to her own daughter and granddaughter, but also to Rosamond herself, when she became caught up in the ensuing turmoil and found herself the beneficiary of a sudden, intense happiness which was just as suddenly snatched away.