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

Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them, as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably low. What could possibly have driven her to leave her home, job and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all contact with her parents? Why is she so reluctant to talk about her past?The Country Life, Rachel Cusk's third novel, is a rich and subtle story about embarrassment, awkwardness and being alone; about families, or the lack of them; and about love in some peculiar guises.

Set over the course of one rainy day in a London suburb, Arlington Park is a viciously funny portrait of a group of young mothers, each bound to their families, each straining for some kind of independence. As the hours pass, Rachel Cusk's graceful, incisive prose passes through the experience of each mother, following them all from the early-morning scrambling, through car trips and visits to the mall, and finally to a dinner party in the evening, when the husbands return and all the conflicts come to the surface.

For de som liker Rachel Cusk - From the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation. The novel unfurls through a series of conversations - in private with friends, late at night at partys with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. A seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourself and of the things we reveal only to strangers

<p>Sylish, shimmering and amoral, Sagan's tale of adolescence and betrayal on the French Riviera was her masterpiece, published when she was just eighteen. However, this frank and explicit novella was considered too daring for 1950s Britain, and sexual scenes were removed for the English publication. Now this fresh and accurate new translation presents the uncensored text in full for the first time.</p><p><i>Bonjour Tristesse</i> tells the story of Cecile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. In <i>A Certain Smile</i>, which is also included in this volume, Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways.</p><p>Both novellas have been freshly translated by Heather Lloyd and include an introduction by Rachel Cusk. Heather Lloyd has also written a new afterword for this edition. </p><p>Francoise Sagan was born in France in 1935. <i>Bonjour tristesse</i> (1954), published when she was just 19, became a <i>succes de scandale</i> and even earned its author a papal denunciation. Sagan went on to write many other novels, plays and screenplays, and died in 2004.</p><p>Heather Lloyd was previously Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, and has published work on both <i>Bonjour tristesse</i> and Francoise Sagan.</p><p>Rachel Cusk is the author of <i>Saving Agnes</i> (1993), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; <i>A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother</i> (2001); and <i>Arlington Park </i>(2006), shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent book is <i>Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation </i>(2012).</p><p>'Funny, thoroughly immoral and thoroughly French' <i>The Times</i></p>

"Når det gjelder oppdragelsen av barn, tror jeg man bør lære dem ikke de små dyder, men de store". Tekstene i "De små dyder" er skrevet i årene mellom 1944 og 1960. Natalia Ginzburg tar utgangspunkt i små gjenstander og personlige erfaringer - utslitte sko, kjøttboller, barndom, moderskap - og forvandler dem til erfaringer av stor betydning. Med andre verdenskrig og tiårene etterpå som bakteppe minnes hun egen barndom i Torino. Hun funderer over barneoppdragelse og over kjærligheten til livet. I etterpåklokskapens lys omfavner hun familiens hverdager i eksil og i Roma under den tyske okkupasjonen. Hun skriver rørende om vennskap, innsiktsfullt om sitt livslange forhold til skrivingen, og festlig og skarpt om London og engelskmenn og om sin andre ektemann, som er hennes rake motsetning i nærmest alt. "De små dyder" er en bok som gjennomsyres av varme, klokskap, sjenerøsitet og humanisme. Ginzburg reflekterer over ensomhet og erindring i etterkrigstidens Europa, samtidig som hun dypest sett skriver om det samme: hva det er å være menneske. Med forord av RACHEL CUSK.

in the wake of her family´s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London.The upheavel is the catalyst for a number of transitions-personal, moral, artistic and practical- as she endeavo...

A vivid and elegant account of a family's season abroad by one of our finest contemporary authors Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato. With her husband and two children, Cusk uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, and the startling thrill of discovery -- at once historic and intimate. Both sharp and humane in its exploration of the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, of beauty and ugliness, and of the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity, The Last Supper is an astonishing memoir.

Since leaving his job to look after Alexa, his eight-year-old daughter, Thomas Bradshaw has found the structure of his daily piano practice and the study of musical form brings a nourishment to these difficult middle years. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and his in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife who has accepted a demanding full-time University job? How can this be good for Alexa and for the family as a whole? Meanwhile Tonie tunes herself out of domestic life, into the harder, headier world of work where long-since forgotten memories of herself are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle and alive to previously unimaginable possibilities . . .

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters.

<p><b>NPR's Favorite Books of 2019</b> <p>Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three "literary masterpieces" (<i>The Washington Post</i>) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in <i>Coventry</i>, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions. <p><i>Coventry</i> encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Fran oise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in <i>Granta</i> ("Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There's a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it's called being sent to Coventry"), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.</p>