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