One Hundred Days of Rain

Book excerpt: Fiction. Winner of the 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and Winner of the 2016 ReLit Award for Fiction. In prose by turns haunting and crystalline, Carellin Brooks' ONE HUNDRED DAYS OF RAIN enumerates an unnamed narrator's encounters with that most quotidian of subjects: rain. Mourning her recent disastrous breakup, the narrator must rebuild a life from the bottom up. As she wakes each day to encounter Vancouver's sky and city streets, the narrator notices that the rain, so apparently unchanging, is in fact kaleidoscopic. Her melancholic mood alike undergoes subtle variations that sometimes echo, sometimes contrast with her surroundings. Caught between the two poles of weather and mood, the narrator is not alone: whether riding the bus with her small child, searching for an apartment to rent, or merely calculating out the cost of meager lunches, the world forever intrudes, as both a comfort and a torment. "A quiet and meditative book that reads like a mystery: How do we find ourselves--sometimes simultaneously--moving both toward and away from the things that matter to us most?"--Johanna Skibsrud