The Rain Before it Falls
Jonathan Coe Audio Book

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. Rosamund realises that she has one last duty to perform: to describe on tape, for Imogen’s benefit, a series of photographs which between them tell a tragic family history.

At the centre of the narrative is Imogen’s grandmother, Beatrix, whose flight from her husband after the war in search of freedom and excitement left a damaging legacy.

But Rosamund’s motive in telling the story is not recrimination. Her aim is to recreate and to explain.