RAIN – Mary Talbot's Website

“There are as many life forms in a handful of soil as there are people on the planet…It’s a factory of life and our survival depends on it”

Set against the backdrop of disastrous floods in the North of England, Rain dramatically chronicles the developing relationship between two young women, one of whom is a committed environmental campaigner. Their wild Brontë moorland is being criminally mismanaged, crops are being systematically poisoned and birds and animals are being slaughtered.

Rain is a complete departure from the Talbots’ previous collaborative work, being neither biographical nor historically distant. Instead it deals with the here and now of the environmental degradation that threatens us all. The story follows the everyday experiences of ordinary people, while engaging with pollution, climate change, moorland mismanagement and the disruption, misery and loss that these things bring. The characters are fictitious; what’s happening around them is shockingly real.

Rain was published in October 2019, by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Dark Horse in USA. The UK edition is available via the Penguin Random House website here; the US edition can be found here. The Spanish edition, Lluvia, was published in June 2020. Available here.