Jonathan Coe titled his last novel “The Closed Circle” (2004), and his new book, “The Rain Before It Falls” (Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95), could fittingly be described as the start of something new. It could also be Mr. Coe’s breakthrough in America. The author of large-cast social novels, like “What a Carve Up!” (1994), an anti-Thatcherite satire, and “The Rotter’s Club” (2001), about young people in the 1970s in the English Midlands, Mr. Coe has sometimes seemed too culturally specific a writer for Americans who are not Anglophiles. “The Closed Circle,” for example, took up the moral ironies of New Labour — but “The Rain Before It Falls” is a universal novel.

As Mr. Coe confessed in a recent newspaper essay, this book is in part an homage to the past — specifically to early-20th-century women authors including Sylvia Townsend Warner, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson, as published in Britain under the Virago Modern Classics imprint (several are available here, from NYRB Classics). There is no common thread linking these authors, really, besides the fact that they are women, but if “The Rain Before It Falls” indicates what Mr. Coe values in this tradition, we can describe a novel of painful private experiences that are sharpened by “authorial compassion,” his phrase.

“The Rain Before It Falls” is presented largely as the memoir of a dying woman, Rosamond. Terminally ill, she has sat down with microphone and tape recorder, as well as whiskey and pills, and proceeded to record no fewer than six hours on cassette tape — which tapes are found by her niece and executrix, Gill. Gill is surprised to find that these tapes are willed to someone named Imogen, a little blind girl who, she soon remembers, she met only once, more than 20 years ago. Unable to locate the little girl, Gill decides to listen to the tapes herself, in the company of her adult daughters.

A genealogy is soon traced: Imogen would be the granddaughter of Rosamond’s favorite cousin, Beatrix. But the reason why Rosamond feels such a connection to Imogen — leaving not only the tapes but a third of her estate to a girl she has not seen in decades — takes the entire novel to explain.

One of the things that makes “The Rain Before It Falls” superb, and which connects it with Mr. Coe’s previous, less personal work, is its way with period detail. Rosamond narrates her story with the aid of 20 different photographs and images, ranging from World War II to the 1980s — a device similar to that of Jon McGregor’s recent, under-celebrated “So Many Ways to Begin,” which uses historical memorabilia to a similar purpose, and which also comprises Britain’s postwar decades in a concise but poignant vision. With Mr. Coe’s device, relying mainly on group family snapshots, there is an inevitable emphasis on fashion — men’s absurdly high-waisted pants in the 1940s, their disastrously fat collars in the 1970s. Tastefully, Rosamond loses interest in fashion as she goes along. But the photographs also chart the course of wartime confusion (evacuation to the countryside), giving way to sober but essentially happy years of postwar privation, which are succeeded by the Technicolor headaches (the pictures go color) of the 1960s.

Far more moving than period detail, though, is the story itself. Once the tapes begin to roll, we notice that Rosamond’s voice is sophisticated, both more articulate and more forthright than that of Gill, who provides the third-person frame story. Gill is by no means a country bumpkin herself, but Rosamond, advertised as a quiet spinster, turns out to be something quite special. We learn that she was gay, and that she eventually became a senior editor at a publishing firm. Rosamond’s early infatuation with her older cousin Beatrix, of course, takes on a different light once she confirms her lesbianism while narrating her 20s. Never salacious or lyrical about sex, she adopts the matter-of-fact dignity of someone who has suffered some prejudice but has prospered, nevertheless, in private.

Privacy and prejudice collide only when Rosamond reaches out to help others. This is the source of the timbre of this elderly, feminine voice, a voice that is a breakthrough in Mr. Coe’s fiction. Beatrix, her beloved cousin, was scorned by her mother. Beatrix, in turn, treated her own daughter, Thea, badly. So badly that she leaves 5-year-old Thea with Rosamond when Rosamond has just set up home with the love of her life — and so Thea becomes for two blissful years the ersatz child to a doomed couple, who part once Beatrix returns to collect her child. Rosamond, now single and unloved, tries to stay in touch with Thea — she evokes “my desire — you might call it a need — to watch over her, to make sure that she was not being entirely starved of love and attention.” But Beatrix uses Rosamond’s sexuality against her, insinuating the prospect of sexual abuse. This process repeats itself — Mr. Coe loves patterns, closed circles — with Thea’s daughter, Imogen, who becomes a ward of the state, and whom Rosamond is eventually forbidden to see.

Part of what makes this outwardly melodramatic story so affecting, besides the sentence-by-sentence smartness of Rosamond’s voice, is our background awareness that it is being heard by the unsuspecting Gill and her daughters. It is as if characters from Mr. Coe’s previous novels, citizens in the swim of contemporary life, suddenly stumbled onto something from another level and were held by it, enrapt.

blytal@nysun.com