Some Rain Must Fall: And Other Stories - Couverture souple

"You don't often see satire stirred with so humane a hand, or tragedy handled with so light a touch . . . This is a man who could give Conrad a run at writing the perfect sentence" (Guardian)

"A gem of inventiveness, a genre-defying, often startling debut" (Scotland on Sunday)

"A rare and vivid imagination and a radical use of language" (The Times)

"A bulging, jostling, glistening, eerie, babbling explosion of a book" (Scotsman)

"Above all Faber has the kind of wide ambition more usually found in his American counterparts" (Literary Review)

"For sheer inventiveness and endless variety, this collection takes the prize" (Independent)

"The author's lightness of touch, sense of humour and capacity for wonder conspires to give far more than mere angst" (Spectator)

"His prose veers sharply from a delectable descriptiveness to spikily comic insights" (The Observer)

"Michel Faber is a master of the short story form." (Times Literary Supplement)

"A collection of astonishingly diverse short stories and one of last year's most original debuts." (The Independent)

"Lovers of the short story take note: Somerset Maugham has shacked up with Ian McEwan, and Some Rain Must Fall is their monstrous, magnificent first-born" (Duncan McLean) --Scotland on Sunday

"Michel Faber has produced a fine first volume . . . these are well-crafted pieces of quiet and forlorn intensity in a very real world" (Mail on Sunday) --Mail on Sunday

"Some Rain Must Fall has an astonishing variety of themes, characters and styles, from delicate psychological probing, to nightmare science fiction, to grotesque, hilarious fable" (Duncan McLean) --Duncan McLean

Michel Faber's short stories are markedly diverse-the voice of each is so distinct that the book reads like an anthology of different writers. But Faber's radically inventive style fastens all fifteen stories into a compelling collection deserving of the high praise it garnered in the United Kingdom. One surreal story, "Fish," projects a futuristic world populated with fish swimming in the air. As sharks hover in abandoned corners and human zealots of the Church of the Armageddon loose their fanaticism on the innocent, it's a mother's full-time job to protect her young daughter. The title story, " Some Rain Must Fall," tells of a substitute schoolteacher called on in a crisis, and as she encourages her pupils to express their feelings, we learn the source of the class's trouble: a devastating act that resonates with contemporary America. As Garth Morris wrote in the Mail on Sunday (London), "these are well-crafted pieces of quiet forlorn intensity in a very real world."