Outline Trilogy

3 primary works Complete

Outline

by Rachel Cusk

Published 2 September 2014

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. 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 a great loss. Outline is Cusk's finest work yet, and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years"--

Transit

by Rachel Cusk

Published 29 September 2016

‘An extraordinary piece of writing – stunningly bold, original and humane’ Joanna Kavenna, Daily Telegraph

A Guardian / New Statesman / Observer / Spectator Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize

In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions – personal, moral, artistic, practical – as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children.

Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed Outline, and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility and the mystery of change.

Kudos

by Rachel Cusk

Published 1 May 2018

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE

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 now 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 - are the most far-reaching questions human beings ask.

These conversations, the last of them with her son, rise dramatically and majestically to a beautiful conclusion.
Kudos completes Rachel Cusk's trilogy with overwhelming power. The trilogy is one of the great achievements in fiction.