Hard Rain Falling
Don Carpenter
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
Recommended by Liv
’Hard Rain Falling follows the lives of Jack Levitt and Billy Lacing as they hustle their ways through the sweaty poolhalls of Portland; endure stints of incarceration and struggle for survival in a world that has already decided the script of their lives. It's a really staggering book – admittedly a crime novel in a rather more Dostoevskian sense – but I am shoehorning it in because it is one of the best things I have read for a while and strongly believe it is a firm American classic.’
From the publisher
A cult hardboiled noir classic of crime, punishment and the search for a meaningful life, with an Introduction by Stuart Evers
When small-time teenage criminal Jack Levitt becomes friends with Billy Lancing, a young Black pool hustler, neither imagines they will meet again years later in St Quentin Prison - or that only one of them will make it out. But what does freedom really mean if you can't escape the hand life has always dealt you? Don Carpenter's shocking, poignant novel is a story of crime, punishment and trying to make sense of it all; of being down, but never quite out.
'Explosive ... Tarmac-tough dialogue and road-novel delinquent action is customised with a tender intensity ... Carpenter brings gold to the grit' Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'A unique read; violent, tender, inexorable, and melancholic ... The small lives contained herein are indelible' Richard Price