Rachel Cusk
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Rachel Cusk
Agnes Day has enjoyed the traditional experiences a middle-class upbringing has to offer: a comfortable home she is eager to escape, parents who love and misunderstand her, a terrifying bout of boarding school followed by an impressive and nearly useless university degree. Now she finds herself on her own and embarking on adult life, without a clue as to how that should actually work.
Living with her two best friends in the London suburbs, toiling as a junior editor at an obscure trade magazine, Agnes manages to give a convincing performance that everything is alright. But her roommates are acting strangely, her boyfriend’s strict schedule is becoming a nuisance, and the world in general seems increasingly out of her control. In great despair, Agnes decides to make it her business to set things straight. How she does this, and what she learns in the process, make for a novel that is a pure delight.
Rachel Cusk explores the business of growing up and moving on with a deftly comic, surprisingly moving touch, confirming her reputation as one of her generation’s smartest and most entertaining writers.
Arlington Park: A Novel
Rachel Cusk
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;…
The Lucky Ones: A Novel
Rachel Cusk
The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life during times of great transformation. The five people whose lives converge here are also haunted by family—the longing for love, the struggle to connect.
A young pregnant mother wrestles with utterly changed circumstances; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can’t fully understand. Accidental connections and overlapping relationships build a complex family portrait: all are linked by the elemental impact of children on adult lives.
This profound evocation of family and its magnetic bonds reveals the mysterious forces that separate us from those we love and bind us to what we no longer understand.
The Lucky Ones will stop you cold with its startling precision and power. Demonstrating a rare gift for illuminating “the bustling concourses of life” without sacrificing emotional depth or complexity, this rare and stunning novel confirms Rachel Cusk’s place among our most incisive writers.
