Author of the Month: Rachel Cusk
Selected by the Bookshop
Our Author of the Month for July is the British novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk.
Beginning with Saving Agnes in 1993, her work consistently explores the female experience, human subjectivity and the life of the artist, culminating in but not concluding with the experimental trilogy of ‘autobiographical fictions’ Outline, Transit and Kudos. The trilogy was followed by Second Place, of which Andrew Schenker in the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote ‘If the Outline trilogy had seemed to push beyond the novel while still working within the form, then Second Place suggests that Cusk may have outgrown the genre entirely.’ Her latest novel Parade, ‘a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat’ according to Kate Kellaway in the Observer, has just been published in paperback by Faber.
Recommended by Victoria
‘This is philosophical fiction at its peak. Parade contains four long chapters that interweave the lives of four different artists – all called G, two men, two women – with the life of the first-person narrator and her husband. Like the characteristic covers, Cusk’s prose is clean and deceptively simple while asking some of the most difficult existential questions: what does it mean to create (produce?) art? Is it anything like creating (producing?) a child? Do the answers to those questions differ depending on whether you are a man or a woman? (Parade’s answer is surely ‘yes’, but in interesting ways.) If we are creations (products?) of our own parents, what do we owe them? In true Cusk fashion, Parade is a novel in which the action is pared down to moments that could be life-changing, if only we recognised them as such.’
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
'A landmark in twenty-first-century English literature.' Andrew Anthony, Observer…
From the publisher:
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021‘A classic, but with contemporary urgency thumping through it.’Claire-Louise Bennett, author of PondA woman invites a famed artist to the remote coastal landscape where she lives. Drawn…
From the publisher:
When Rachel Cusk decides to travel to Italy for a summer with her husband and two young children, she has no idea of the trials and wonders that lie in store. Their journey leads them to both the expected and the surprising, all seen…
From the publisher:
'Cements her reputation as one of the most fierce and elegant chroniclers of how we live now.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer…
From the publisher:
In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters.
From the publisher:
Marble in Metamorphosis contemplates the physical and cultural life of marble. It explores the ethics, politics and symbolism of its use and deliberates over the spirit of the material and why some cultures so revere and desire it. In…
From the publisher:
When eighteen-year-old Michael visits the Hanbury's remote family home he is captivated by their bohemian lifestyle. Years later, when he marries the strong-willed, beautiful Rebecca, he is secretly hoping to create his own version of that…
From the publisher:
Ralph Loman works in an unsatisfying job, for a free London newspaper, when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party. Her beauty ignites a blaze of excitement in his…
From the publisher:
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…
From the publisher:
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy-enough daughter and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at…
From the publisher:
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY…
From the publisher:
Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them, as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably…
From the publisher:
The much-praised new novel from award-winning author Rachel Cusk, who was one of Granta's Best of British writers.…
From the publisher:
Novelist Rachel Cusk explores themes of arrival, transition, and loss in this account of a time spent in Greece. Her experience of the potency and fragility of landscape leads to an examination of the moral ambiguity of human creativity.…
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