The stunning new novel from Rachel Cusk, shortlisted for the Baileys Prize, the Folio Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize
Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. She is the author of nine novels and three works of non-fiction. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes- Outline (2014) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Giller Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award. It was also picked by the New York Times as one of the top ten books of the year. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2015 her version of Euripides? 'Medea? was put on at the Almeida Theatre with Rupert Goold directing and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
"One of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of
fiction I've ever read"
*Observer*
"Mesmerising"
*New Yorker*
"Brilliant…absorbing, thought-provoking"
*Evening Standard*
"Rachel Cusk breaks all the rules... Outline captivates"
*Independent*
"If life were fair, Rachel Cusk would win every prize going for
Outline "
*Observer*
"Winter bouquets should be offered to the clever and stylish Rachel
Cusk: her novel Outline is smoothly accomplished, and fascinating
both on the surface and in its depths"
*Guardian*
"Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great
variety of human beings down on to the page with both immediacy and
depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to
read as a thriller… A stellar accomplishment"
*Guardian*
"A clever thought experiment that’s far too readable ever to feel
like one"
*Sunday Times*
"A piece of work of great beauty and ambition. Narratives are
smoothed, as if by translation and retranslation, into their
simplest, barest elements: parents, children, divorces, cakes,
dresses, dogs. These elements then build, layer on layer, to form
the most complex and exquisitely detailed patterns, swirling and
whirling, wheels within wheels"
*London Review of Books*
"Cool but compelling, narrow in focus perhaps, but deep in
thought"
*Scotsman*
"A lethally intelligent novel"
*New York Times Book Review*
"A book whose almost dream-like quality has razor-sharp edges"
*Spectator*
"A spare, stylish novel which leaves one’s mind buzzing… Readable,
thought-provoking, full of stories, it’s a tour de force. I can’t
think of any other novel quite like it"
*Independent*
"Sharply observed...everyone the narrator meets has a vivid
presence"
*Literary Review*
"Outline is a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way
of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled
awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it
means to listen to other people... While little happens in Outline,
everything seems to happen. You find yourself pulling the novel
closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were
dangling over a snake pit"
*New York Times*
"It’s a strange, oblique, devastated novel that inhabits the
landscape after a big break-up without giving up any details. It
has a chilly beauty, and hasn’t quite left my head since I read it
six months ago"
*Financial Times*
"Outline teems with provoking, fascinating ideas expressed in fine,
apothegmatic prose"
*Wall Street Journal*
"A quietly radical new novel... The result, which recalls Karl Ove
Knausgaard in its effort to melt away the comforting artifice of
fiction, is a kind of photonegative portrait of a woman who resists
concessions in life and art"
*Vogue*
"Never less than compelling... Material that might have been
ponderous in other hands is, here, magnetic, thanks to the mystery
at the heart of Cusk's book, her exquisite lightness of touch and
her glinting wit"
*Daily Mail*
"Cusk confounds expectations... Outline is full of such wonderful
surprises: subtle shifts in power and unexpectedly witty
interludes"
*Daily Telegraph*
"Described as a “novel in ten conversations”...it turns out to be a
clever, fresh device that dispenses with the need for much of a
plot and presents instead more of a lush human collage... A rich,
thoughtful read"
*The Times*
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