About the Author

Peter Robinson was born in 1953 in the north west of England and holds degrees from York and Cambridge. After spending eighteen years as a visiting lecturer in Japan, he returned to Britain to take up a professorship in English and American literature at the University of Reading. The author of aphorisms, short stories, memoirs and literary criticism, as well as numerous collections of poetry and translations, he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations. All through the years Peter Robinson was publishing and developing a reputation as 'the finest poet of his generation' (PN Review) and 'a major English poet' (Poetry Review), he was also working when time and inspiration allowed on a collection of short stories and a novel. Foreigners, Drunks and Babies, the first of these, was described in The London Magazine as 'an impressive body of work which deserves to gain a wider readership' on its appearance in 2013. September in the Rain, his carefully structured and evocatively written first novel, is a vivid narrative of young love in difficulties, its choices and dilemmas, responsibilities and distances, the consequences of guilty feelings and violent transformations.

Reviews

'A beautiful novel: profoundly upsetting, as its subject matter requires, but one which also offers a kind of redemption, thanks to the tone of rueful, quizzical honesty in which Peter Robinson narrates. The patient beauties of his poetry are carried over seamlessly into this, his first work of fiction.'-Jonathan Coe, author of What A Carve Up!, The Rotters Club, and Number 11; 'September in the Rain is a novel of extraordinary beauty and courage. It takes on a difficult and complex subject and explores it with sensitivity, wit and humanity. Peter Robinson is a writer of great panache and wisdom. I defy anyone not to be moved by his story'-Paula Byrne, author of Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson; 'To call this story a trauma narrative is to do it a disservice. It is a dark and tender tale of violation, but also more than that. As much as anything it's a triumph of style, its sentences being assayed with a poet's feeling for the weight of each word'-Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland