British · b. 1967
Rachel Cusk is a British-Canadian author acclaimed for her formally innovative autofiction, best known for the Outline trilogy.
Rachel Cusk is known for fiction and memoir of unusual candor and formal daring, which has reshaped contemporary ideas of what the novel can be.
Her Outline trilogy — Outline, Transit, and Kudos — dispenses with conventional plot in favor of a narrator who largely recedes, recording the confidences of others, producing a cool, intelligent, and influential new form of autofiction. Her earlier memoirs of motherhood and divorce, A Life’s Work and Aftermath, were both acclaimed and controversial for their unsparing honesty.
Cusk is admired as one of the most original and rigorous voices in contemporary literature, a writer who interrogates selfhood, narrative, and truth.
by Rachel Cusk
Faye travels to Athens to teach a creative writing course. She has a series of conversations — on the plane, with students, with a man she meets for dinner twice. She tells the reader almost nothing about herself directly. What emerges is a portrait in negative space: we understand who Faye is from the lives she encounters and the questions she asks.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)
by Rachel Cusk
The second novel of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. Faye has returned to London from Athens and bought a flat she is renovating. She has more conversations — with a hairdresser, an old university friend, a fellow writer, her downstairs neighbours. The construction of a home becomes the novel's structuring metaphor for the question of rebuilding a self.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.