Michel Faber's first collection of short stories reveals an extraordinarily vivid imagination, a deep love of language and an adventurous versatility. Playful, yet profoundly moving, wickedly satirical yet sincerely humane, these tales never fail to strike unexpected chords.

"You don't often see satire stirred with so humane a hand, or tragedy handled with so light a touch . . . This is a man who could give Conrad a run at writing the perfect sentence" (Guardian)

"A gem of inventiveness, a genre-defying, often startling debut" (Scotland on Sunday)

"A rare and vivid imagination and a radical use of language" (The Times)

"For sheer inventiveness and endless variety, this collection takes the prize" (Independent)

"Above all Faber has the kind of wide ambition more usually found in his American counterparts" (Literary Review)

"A bulging, jostling, glistening, eerie, babbling explosion of a book" (Scotsman)

"The author's lightness of touch, sense of humour and capacity for wonder conspires to give far more than mere angst" (Spectator)

"His prose veers sharply from a delectable descriptiveness to spikily comic insights" (The Observer)

"Michel Faber is a master of the short story form" (Times Literary Supplement)

"A collection of astonishingly diverse short stories and one of last year's most original debuts." (The Independent)

"Lovers of the short story take note: Somerset Maugham has shacked up with Ian McEwan, and Some Rain Must Fall is their monstrous, magnificent first-born" (Duncan McLean)

"Michel Faber has produced a fine first volume . . . these are well-crafted pieces of quiet and forlorn intensity in a very real world" (Mail on Sunday)

"Some Rain Must Fall has an astonishing variety of themes, characters and styles, from delicate psychological probing, to nightmare science fiction, to grotesque, hilarious fable" (Duncan McLean)