Author of the Booker-longlisted novel Second Place

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.

Author of the Booker-longlisted novel Second Place

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 dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. 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 great a great loss.

Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle - a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times.

'An incitement to riot . . . It's an extraordinary piece of work and the writing is utterly beautiful . . . I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition.' Esther Freud

'As compulsive as a thriller.' Kate Kellaway, Observer

'Thank god for Rachel Cusk's beautifully written and compelling memoir.' Claire Messud, Guardian Books of the Year

'Cusk is not afraid to address frankly the grief for freedom lost, the despair, pain, boredom and guilt - all in the context of the mother's unspeakable love for the baby . . . Perhaps the most beautifully written and moving book on the subject.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer

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 work, which has provoked acclaim and outrage in equal measure.

National Bestseller • A Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • A Finalist for the Goldsmiths Prize • Longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award • One of Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Commonweal, Southern Living, NOW Magazine, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Book Depository, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post (Canada)

The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015

In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, and practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.

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 novel 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.

In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.

Using her own life as a starting point, Rachel looks at the issues that arise for a woman in the years after she has lived the defining experiences of feminity. She writes about marriage, separation, motherhood, work, money, domesticity and love. Cusk considers the kinds of generational knowledge the contemporary woman harbours, the terrors or expectations that have been passed down to her and that are refracted through the modern transformation of female status.

Aftermath is written in the personal/political mode that characterised A Life's Work, Cusk's acclaimed book about becoming a mother.

Traduit de l'anglais par Céline Leroy


Au coeur de l'été, une romancière britannique se rend à Athènes pour animer un atelier d'écriture. D'elle, nous ne saurons presque rien.
Parce qu'elle est parfaitement vacante, elle prête une oreille attentive à ce que disent les autres et devient comme une chambre d'écho. Les voix de ceux qu'elle croise sur son chemin – hommes mariés, séparés, courtisans, femmes écrivains, féministes – se répondent et dessinent une histoire. À travers eux, en filigrane, c'est sa propre vie qui se révèle sous un autre jour.



Dans une atmosphère qui évoque les romans de Nathalie Sarraute, Rachel Cusk interroge le discours d'autrui et compose un roman subtil en forme de portrait " extime ".

"Si j'avais eu un jour la possibilité de voir ce que l'avenir me réservait, j'aurais avant tout voulu savoir si j'allais avoir des enfants. Plus que l'amour, plus que le travail, plus que le nombre d'années ou la quantité de bonheur auxquels j'aurais droit, cette question était pour moi le mystère central."

Toute femme, qu'elle désire des enfants ou non, est confrontée à la question de la maternité. Aujourd'hui encore, ce sujet reste entouré de tabous, comme s'il était impossible de donner la vie sans obéir à la fiction rassurante de la félicité.

Au-delà de l'amour infini et de la joie qui l'ont envahie lorsqu'elle est devenue mère, Rachel Cusk explore, dans L'OEuvre d'une vie, le chaos qui succède à la béatitude. Avec un humour tranchant et une absolue sincérité, elle dynamite les clichés et raconte les bouleversements qui accompagnent l'arrivée d'un enfant dans la vie d'une femme, ce moment de transition entre la perte d'une identité et l'émergence d'une autre.

Traduit de l'anglais par Lori Saint-Martin et Paul Gagné

Agnes Day - sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire - is unwell. Terminally middle-class, incurably romantic and chronically confused by life's most basic interactions, Agnes discovers disconcerting gaps in her general understanding of the world, making recovery unlikely. Life and love go on without her, but with a little facade, she can pass herself off as a success. Beneath the fiction, however, the burden of truth becomes harder to bear.

'She is a writer with a poet's eye for convincing detail, and touches on the raw emotions of life in a way that is affecting and true.' Sunday Telegraph

'Told with irony and insight and some surreally beautiful imagery. At times it made me laugh out loud.' Sheila Mackay

La esperada nueva novela de Rachel Cusk tras la revolucionaria trilogía A contraluz.

Una mujer invita a un prestigioso pintor a pasar una temporada con ella y su familia en una casa de invitados que acaban de construir junto a la remota marisma en la que viven; profundamente conmovida por su pintura, alberga la esperanza de que la particular mirada del artista ilumine desde una nueva perspectiva su propia existencia.

La visita alterará la quietud de su vida y le revelará aspectos tan singulares de la existencia humana como la distancia que separa la realidad de las ficciones que nos construimos, las sutiles dinámicas de poder que dominan nuestras relaciones, en especial entre hombres y mujeres, o lo difícil que resulta ser auténticamente libre.

Segunda casa añade una pieza clave a la admiradísima obra novelística de Rachel Cusk, una autora capaz de seguir sorprendiendo a sus numerosos lectores con la inconfundible originalidad, profundidad y penetración psicológica de su literatura. Una novela de una asombrosa perfección formal que, a través de la meticulosa indagación en nuestros deseos y contradicciones, nos demuestra que el arte puede ser tan salvífico como destructivo.

«La autora vuelve a adoptar la primera persona como lugar desde el que diseccionar la experiencia de ser mujer. El yo emerge como una estructura literaria sólida y certera; su discurso, sin concesiones, llega a los recovecos más incómodos de la intimidad femenina. (…)Y yo no he parado de subrayar este libro con devota admiración.» Begoña Méndez (El Cultural)

«M. es una típica creación de Cusk: inmersa en procesos de autoconocimiento y sanación que parten de interrogar y cuestionarlo todo, aspira a descorrer velos, neutralizar convencionalismos y depurar autoengaños (…) Cusk arriesga mucho descartando la mera descripción de la emoción y el sentimiento por la interpretación de esa emoción y ese sentimiento.» Antonio Lozano (Cultura/s - La Vanguardia)

«Si hay una escritora actual capaz de convencerme de que lo que cuenta no es tan esencial con respecto a cómo lo cuenta es Rachel Cusk.» Luis M. Alonso (La Nueva España)

«Es una versión “en deuda” con "Lorenzo en Taos", la crónica de Mabel Dodge Luhan sobre la estancia de D. H. Lawrence en su casa. La novela de Cusk es un tributo a esa mujer, y este juego de transposición permite a Cusk hacerse preguntas sobre temas de actualidad con un enfoque original.» Aloma Rodríguez (Letras Libres)

«Cusk tiene seguridad en sus pensamientos y los transmite con convicción y audacia. Hay firmeza en su prosa y en su discurso.» Francisco Millet Alcoba (La Opinión de Murcia)

«Hay pocas novelas en las mesas de novedades en las que la inteligencia del autor despunte prácticamente en cada página. "Segunda casa", de Rachel Cusk, es una de estas excepciones.» Jordi Nopca (Diari Ara)

«La narración, con una densa dimensión abstracta, logra horadar los personajes y propone una reflexión en torno al arte, muy entrelazada con la figura del artista, en la que un pretendido salvavidas puede ser una estaca.

Author of the Booker-longlisted novel Second Place

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

After the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, both startling and rewarding to behold.

The result is a cumulative sense of how the frank, deeply intelligent sensibility - so evident in her stories and novels - reverberates in the wider context of Cusk's literary process. Coventry grants its readers a rare opportunity to see a mind at work that will influence literature for time to come.

" Je reçus un e-mail d'une astrologue m'informant qu'elle avait d'importantes nouvelles à m'annoncer à propos d'événements censés survenir bientôt dans ma vie. "


L'importante nouvelle que Faye apprend dès les premières pages, c'est qu'un transit majeur doit se produire prochainement dans son ciel. De grands bouleversements sont à prévoir. Mais n'est-ce pas inévitable, quand on refait sa vie après une séparation ? Elle vient d'emménager à Londres avec ses deux fils. Profitant d'un moment où ils sont chez leur père, elle se livre à la rénovation du nouvel appartement. Ce qui n'était qu'une étape très matérielle de l'existence prend des tours inattendus et débouche sur des questionnements bien plus profonds : comment habiter une nouvelle vie ? Est-il vraiment possible de transformer ce qu'on est ?


Transit approfondit les thématiques que Rachel Cusk avait explorées dans Disent-ils. Maniant à la fois l'humour, la lucidité et une capacité d'observation exceptionnelle, ce roman est également l'émouvant portrait d'une femme qui cherche sa place dans le monde.