The long-lost final manuscript from the late novelist Maritta Wolff is an exceptional rendering of middle class disaffection in the early 1970s. Sudden Rain infiltrates the interior lives of five couples in Los Angeles over the course of one stormy weekend and alters these marriages forever. The couples range in age from early 20s to late 60s: one couple’s 30-year marriage is crumbling, and their son has split from his wife of one year. A neighbor who thought she was happy with her husband starts to stray after having an eye-opening conversation with a friend, and another friend who knows she’s unhappy with her marriage looks for fulfillment only to stumble into a fatal accident. Everyone is caught up short and compelled at last to reconsider the choices they’ve made.

Maritta Wolff (1918-2002) won the Avery Hopwood Award for her first novel, Whistle Stop, at age 22. Sudden Rain is a vivid distillation of its time and place and a spellbinding achievement - one sure to invite comparison to the likes of such classics as John Updike’s Rabbit novels and Mary McCarthy’s The Group.

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Whistle Stop
by Maritta Wolff

Whistle Stop is an unforgettable story of passion, crime and family that provides a gripping portrait of post-Depression America in a small Midwestern town on the outskirts of a large city. Through the course of a punishing hot summer, the readers experience life with the Veech family as they bicker, brawl, make up, and provide titillating morsels of scandal for the neighborhood.

Originally published in 1941, during the course of its five printings, the novel was a runaway bestseller and the basis for the 1946 film starring Ava Gardner and George Raft. Wolff was able to fuse John O’Hara’s naturalism with the trappings of the American crime novel to create a suspenseful and true-to-life portrait of American poverty.

“Whistle Stop had a kind of raw, flaming vitality which it was impossible to resist, plus an uncanny, ironic knowledge of human motives…. It was obvious that Miss Wolff possessed that unquenchable interest in people which is part of born novelist’s equipment, and that her vein of rich invention was unlikely to run dry.”
--The New York Times Book Review, November 1942