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.

A Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator and Observer Book of the Year

**Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize**

'A work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality.' Monica Ali, New York Times
'Tremendous from its opening sentence.' Tessa Hadley, Guardian
'A work of cut-glass brilliance.' Financial Times

In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions­ - personal, moral, artistic, and practical - as she endeavours 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.

'[Transit] confirms that one of the most fascinating projects in contemporary fiction is unfolding in Rachel Cusk's trilogy.' Adam Foulds

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

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.

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 ".

'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.

"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

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother is multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk’s honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood.

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion.

In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusk’s account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.

“Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary—sort of Apocalypse Baby Now…A Life’s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.”—The New York Times Book Review

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

Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb very much like its American counterparts, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilization: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. In Arlington Park, men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. It's a world awash in contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. How are they to know right from wrong? How should they use their knowledge of other people's sufferings? What is the relationship of politics to their own domestic arrangements?

Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.

Darkly comic, deeply affecting, and wise, Arlington Park is a page-turning imagining of the extraordinary inner nature of ordinary life, by one of Britain's most exciting young novelists.