With the trailblazing sex scenes of his novel What Belongs to You (2016) and his linked short-story collection Cleanness (2020), Garth Greenwell emerged as a laureate of the libido. Although he has said that an autobiographical reading of his writings ‘underestimates the extent to which memory is fictional’, his narrator is, like Greenwell himself, a gay poet who grew up in Kentucky with a homophobic father and spent some time teaching in Sofia, where the two books are set.

In Small Rain, Greenwell mines his own life to describe a bodily experience of a different variety: a hospital stay after an aortic tear, a potentially fatal medical condition. Six months into the pandemic, the narrator, now in his forties, is suddenly aware of a pain that feels like someone has ‘plunged a hand into [his] gut and grabbed hold and yanked’. He recounts in detail the ensuing hospitalisation in Iowa, during which he reflects on his relationship with his partner, L, their house renovation, poetry, music, Covid-19 and the American healthcare system. The narrator’s fear of dying is muted by the oxycontin he’s prescribed for his pain: ‘It was like a movie or a dream, not my own life exactly but something with a different reality status.’

It is no small feat to make illness compelling on the page; authors who have risen to the challenge include Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens and Colm Tóibín. The best writings on the subject temper the need to face mortality with humour. Greenwell is self-admittedly