Outline, Rachel Cusk
Outline, Rachel Cusk
4 Rating(s)
List: $16.95 | Sale: $11.87
Club: $8.47

Outline

Author: Rachel Cusk

Narrator: Kate Lock

Unabridged: 7 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/12/2022

Synopsis

A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking—about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. 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 takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.

About Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk is the author of three memoirs—A Life ’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath—and seven novels: Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.

About Kate Lock

Kate Lock has played Mrs. Linde in The Doll’s House, Celia in Captain Oates Left Sock, and several leading roles at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. She co-wrote Tuesday’s Child with Terry Johnson and in it played Teresa Doyle at Theatre Royal, Stratford, and for the BBC. She has also appeared in several television productions, including Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends, Coronation Street, The Brief, The Bill, and Sweet Nothings, as well as comedy sketches with Rory Bremner, Hale and Pace, and Morecambe & Wise.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Beth on December 22, 2015

Damn you, Rachel Cusk. This book was absolutely infuriating. As I was reading it, I kept telling myself that I hated it. And so, I burned through it in a a little more than 24 hours. It bears little resemblance to any other novel I've ever read. The characters seem vague and unformed, but they come......more

Goodreads review by Violet on May 30, 2016

Reading Outline is like spying on an author in the process of auditioning characters for a future novel. In other words it is indeed an outline, an outline for a work that it still shadowy in the writer’s mind. Cusk interviews her potential characters and lets them tell her emotionally pivotal stori......more

Goodreads review by emma on April 10, 2024

the entire universe conspired for me to not like this book, and i liked it anyway. by which i mean, i read this book in what i imagine is the worst possible way: i picked it up, read 2/3 of it, forgot i was reading it, allowed several months to pass, and then was fully surprised / confused when to se......more

Goodreads review by William2 on November 11, 2024

Mellifluous with a beautifully honed thematic core. The tone nimbly alternates between black despair and forlornness and subtle humor. If E.M. Forster excelled at intrusive narrators, always commenting on events, Rachel Cusk’s narrator here might be called unintrusive for the way she hangs back and......more

Quotes

“Brilliant…These ten remarkable conversations, told with immense control, focus a sharp eye on how we discuss family and our lives.” Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

“As the profile of her main character grows more defined in relief, so does Cusk’s underlying message about love, loss, and feminine identity in the modern world, evident not only in her story but also in its delivery. Outline is an expertly crafted portrait that asks readers to look deeply into the text for discovery.” Booklist (starred review)

“Cusk returns to fiction and top form in a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and others…Rich in human variety and unsentimental empathy.” Kirkus Reviews

“Rachel Cusk has constructed a restrained, incisive narrative of high stylistic polish and stealthy emotional power. Formally inventive, astringently intellectual, and linguistically assured, Outline poses the question of where stories come from; it shows, with glittering clarity, why they matter.” Rebecca March, author of My Life in Middlemarch

“Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down onto the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller…A stellar accomplishment.” The Guardian

“This has to be one of the oddest, most breathtakingly original and unsettling novels I ’ve read in a long time…Every single word is earned, precisely tuned, enthralling. Outline is a triumph of attitude and daring, a masterclass in tone.” The Observer (London)

“Cusk’s uncompromising, often brutal intelligence is at full power. So is her technique…I can’t think of a book that so powerfully resists summary or review…Inevitably, the only way to get close to the fascinating and elusive core of Outline is to read it.” Financial Times (London)

“A uniquely graceful and innovative piece of artistic self-possession, which achieves the rare feat of seamlessly amalgamating form and substance.” The Independent (London)

“Outline. It defies ordinary categorization. It is about authorial invisibility, it involves writing without showing your face. The narrator is a writer who goes to teach creative writing in Greece and becomes enmeshed in other peoples’ narratives, which Cusk stitches, with fastidious brilliance, into a single fabric.” The Observer (London)

“The writing is brilliant…Cusk is always cerebral but I ’ve never noticed her drollery before…Absorbing, thought-provoking.” London Evening Standard

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