The new book from “the best English novelist of our day,” as Jonathan Coe was dubbed by his colleague Nick Hornby, is a complex and intricate story. Rosamond, who lived a long life full of secrets, dies in a mansion hidden from human eyes. She leaves her heirs a collection of old photographs and several tape cassettes - her story. A blind girl lost in time, her strange mother and unbridled grandmother - Rosamond describes how their lives are intertwined with her own, trying in her last hours to unravel the mystery of their desires and motivations. “Before the Rain Falls” is a novel-reflection on the past, in which everything is intertwined with the present, a book about the eternal and the momentary. Jonathan Coe's new book is sensual, tense and quiet prose, in which everything is entirely half-shade and half-tone.