A heartbreaking novel of family secrets from one of the masters of modern fiction, The Rain Before it Falls is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics

Deeply moving and compelling, The Rain Before it Falls is the story of three generations of one family riven by tragedy. When Rosamund, a reluctant bearer of family secrets, dies suddenly, a mystery is left for her niece Gill to unravel. Some photograph albums and tapes point towards a blind girl named Imogen whom no one has seen in twenty years. The search for Imogen and the truth of her inheritance becomes a shocking story of mothers and daughters and of how sadness, like a musical refrain, may haunt us down the years.

'A sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters' Guardian

'Entirely compelling...the plot will keep you rapt...reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most effective' New Statesman

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of 14 novels: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters' Club, The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Expo 58, Number 11, Middle England, Mr Wilder and Me and Bournville. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, amongst many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre de l'Art et des Lettres. His work been translated into 22 languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.