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#14 in the New York Times '100 Best Books of the 21st Century' The first in Rachel Cusk's landmark trilogy, shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the Goldsmith Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Prize. 'A work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality.' Monica Ali, New York Times 'One of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of fiction I've ever read.' Observer 'A perfect synthesis of form and content.' Deborah Levy Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face great a great loss.
A Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator and Observer Book of the Year The second book in Rachel Cusk's critically-acclaimed trilogy. 'A work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality.' Monica Ali, New York Times 'Tremendous from its opening sentence.' Tessa Hadley, Guardian 'A work of cut-glass brilliance.' Financial Times In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic, and practical - as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consid...
'One of the most astoundingly original and necessary books I've ever read.' Guardian 'A landmark in twenty-first-century English literature.' Observer 'Compelling from its first pages to its extraordinary final scene.' New Statesman 'A perfect synthesis of form and content.' Deborah Levy A woman on a plane listens to the stranger in the seat next to hers telling her the story of his life: his work, his marriage, and the harrowing night he has just spent burying the family dog. That woman is Faye, who is on her way to Europe to promote the book she has just published. Once she reaches her destination, the conversations she has with the people she meets - about art, about family, about politics, about love, about sorrow and joy, about justice and injustice - include the most far-reaching questions human beings ask. These conversations, the last of them on the phone with her son, rise dramatically and majestically to a beautiful conclusion. Following the novels Outline and Transit, Kudos completes Rachel Cusk's trilogy with overwhelming power.
Using her own life as a starting point, Rachel looks at the issues that arise for a woman in the years after she has lived the defining experiences of feminity. She writes about marriage, separation, motherhood, work, money, domesticity and love. Cusk considers the kinds of generational knowledge the contemporary woman harbours, the terrors or expectations that have been passed down to her and that are refracted through the modern transformation of female status.Aftermath is written in the personal/political mode that characterised A Life's Work, Cusk's acclaimed book about becoming a mother.
A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.
Author of the Booker-longlisted novel Second PlaceA GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEARAfter the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, both startling and rewarding to behold. The result is a cumulative sense of how the frank, deeply intelligent sensibility - so evident in her stories and novels - reverberates in the wider context of Cusk's literary process. Coventry grants its readers a rare opportunity to see a mind at work that will influence literature for time to come.
'An incitement to riot . . . It's an extraordinary piece of work and the writing is utterly beautiful . . . I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition.' Esther Freud 'As compulsive as a thriller.' Kate Kellaway, Observer 'Thank god for Rachel Cusk's beautifully written and compelling memoir.' Claire Messud, Guardian Books of the Year 'Cusk is not afraid to address frankly the grief for freedom lost, the despair, pain, boredom and guilt - all in the context of the mother's unspeakable love for the baby . . . Perhaps the most beautifully written and moving book on the subject.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer A Life's Work is Rachel Cusk's funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. An education in babies, books, breast-feeding, toddler groups, broken nights, bad advice and never being alone, it is a landmark work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION A woman arrives in Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Once there, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voices begins to weave a complex human tapestry: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE, THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE AND LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC PRIZE
"These novels are among the most important written in this century so far." --The Globe and Mail Rachel Cusk's ambitious Outline trilogy has received acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Outline (2015) was a finalist for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Transit (2017), has been called "dreamlike" (Toronto Star), "extraordinary" (The Daily Telegraph) and "a work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality" (The New York Times Book Review). And Kudos (2018) has been called "intellectually entrancing" (The Globe and Mail), "radical and beautiful" (The New Yorker) and "bracingly compelling" (Vogue). Brought together in one exqui...
Agnes Day - sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire - is unwell. Terminally middle-class, incurably romantic and chronically confused by life's most basic interactions, Agnes discovers disconcerting gaps in her general understanding of the world, making recovery unlikely. Life and love go on without her, but with a little facade, she can pass herself off as a success. Beneath the fiction, however, the burden of truth becomes harder to bear. 'She is a writer with a poet's eye for convincing detail, and touches on the raw emotions of life in a way that is affecting and true.' Sunday Telegraph 'Told with irony and insight and some surreally beautiful imagery. At times it made me laugh out loud.' Sheila Mackay