Longlisted for the 2014 Man Book Prize, History of the Rain is one of those books that I meant to read at the time but forgot about, until recently.
If you liked Long Island by Colm Toibin then you’ll enjoy this even more poetic look at life in Faha, a small village in County Clare, on the banks of the river Shannon. Here we meet Ruthie Swain who is home from college and bedridden. Her illness is not clearly revealed but through lopping stories we discover all the tales of her family tree from the Reverend Swain all the way down to her twin brother.
The novel is not magic realism but there is some otherworldliness to it, men turning into salmon and the like, but there is also a steady stream of literary references from Virgil to Charles Dickens to William Blake to Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s a literary lover’s dream novel.
History of the Rain is sad and affecting, it’s full of longing and loss but also it’s a great love story.