A Country of Small Rain

Nell Ferriday’s mother was diagnosed at fifty-eight. This is an account of the following eighteen months, written mostly at night, and it declines every consolation the genre normally offers.

It is not a book about the dignity of illness or about what her mother taught her. It is a book about laundry, about the specific administrative cruelty of continuing healthcare assessments, and about the fact that grief can be extremely boring.

Ferriday reads it herself. We offered her four narrators and she was right to refuse all of them; there are passages here that would be unbearable in a trained voice, and are survivable in hers.