The Man Who Rained E-Book

Ali Shaw

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

From the Costa Prize shortlisted-author of The Girl with Glass Feet comes another magical novel of love, discovery and nature. The Man Who Rained is a work of lyrical, mercurial magic and imagination, a modern-day fable about the elements of love. When Elsa's father is killed in a tornado, all she wants is to escape - from New York, her job, her boyfriend - to somewhere new, anonymous, set apart. For some years she has been haunted by a sight once seen from an aeroplane: a tiny, isolated settlement called Thunderstown. Thunderstown has received many a pilgrim, and young Elsa becomes its latest - drawn to this weather-ravaged backwater, this place rendered otherworldly by the superstitions of its denizens. In Thunderstown, they say, the weather can come to life and when Elsa meets Finn Munro, an outcast living in the mountains above the town, she wonders whether she has witnessed just that. For Finn has an incredible secret: he has a thunderstorm inside of him. Not everyone in town wants happiness for Elsa and Finn. As events turn against them, can they weather the tempest - can they survive at all?

Leseprobe

First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Ali Shaw 2012

The moral right of Ali Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9-780-85789-032-0 eISBN: 9-780-85789-798-5

Export and Airside Trade Paperback ISBN: 9-780-85789-033-7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.com

‘These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air,

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on.’

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Contents

1 THE CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS

2 AN EXECUTION

3 CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN

4 A HISTORY OF CULLERS

5 WILD IS THE WIND

6 PART WEATHER

7 OLD MAN THUNDER

8 THE LIVES OF THE CLOUDS

9 THE SOLEMN TEMPLES

10 BETTY AND THE LIGHTNING

11 THE GORGEOUS PALACES

12 GUNSHOT

13 OLD WIVES’ TALES

14 BIRTHDAYS

15 PAPER BIRDS

16 BROOK HORSE

17 KITE

18 THE LETTER FROM BETTY

19 THINGS SPIRAL

20 AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON

21 WERE ALL SPIRITS, AND ARE MELTED INTO AIR

22 THE LOVER OF THUNDER

1

THE CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS

The rain began with one gentle tap at her bedroom window, then another and another and then a steady patter at the glass. She opened the curtains and beheld a sky like tarnished silver, with no sign of the sun. She had hoped so hard for a morning such as this that she let out a quiet cry of relief.

When the cab came to take her to the airport, water spattered circles across its windscreen. The low-banked cloud smudged Manhattans towers into the atmosphere and the cab driver complained about the visibility. She described how dearly she loved these gloomy mornings, when the drizzle proved the solid world insubstantial, and he bluntly informed her that she was crazy. She craned her neck to look out of the window, upwards at the befogged promises above her.

She did not think she was crazy, but these last few months she had come close. At the start of the summer she would have described herself as a sociable, successful and secure twenty-nine-year-old. Now, at the worn-out end of August, all she knew was that she was still twenty-nine.

At the airport she drifted through check-in. She paced back and forth in the departures lounge. She was the first in the boarding queue. Even when she had strapped herself into her seat; even as she watched the cabin crews bored safety routine; even as the prim lady seated beside her twisted the crackling wrapper of a bright boiled sweet; even with every detail too lucid to be a dream, she still feared that all the promises of the moment might be wrenched from her.

Life, Elsa Beletti reckoned, took delight in wrenching things from her.

Elsas looks came from her mothers side of the family. The Belettis had given her unruly black hair, burned-brown eyes and the sharp eyebrows that inflected her every expression with a severity she didnt often intend. She was slim enough for her own liking most months of the year, but her mother and all of her aunts were round. At family gatherings they orbited one another like globes in a cosmos. She feared that one morning she would wake up to find genetics had caught up with her, that her body had changed into something nearly spherical and her voice, which she treasured for its keen whisper like the snick of a knife, had turned into that of a true Beletti matriarch, making every sentence into a drama of decibels.

Her surname (which she gained aged sixteen, after her mother had kicked her father out) and her physique were all she had inherited from the Belettis. She had always considered herself more like her dad, whose own family history existed only in unverified legends passed down to him by his grandparents. One ancestor, they had told him, had been the navigator on a pilgrim tall ship. He had coaxed the winds into the vessels sails to carry its settlers over unfathomable waters en route to a new nation. Another was said to have been a Navajo medicine man, who had survived the forced exodus of his people from their homeland and helped maintain under oppression their belief in the Holy Wind, which gave them breath and left its spiral imprint on their fingertips and toes.