KUDOS

By Rachel Cusk
The third book in the Outline Trilogy
Picador, 2017

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Description

Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.

In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.

Reviews

“The [Outline] trilogy is a bravura interrogation of the social habits and assumptions that, assembled together, start to look suspiciously like a man’s world in which women just so happen to live . . . [Outline, Transit, and Kudos] stand as a landmark in 21st-century English literature, the culmination of an artist’s unshakable efforts to forge her own path.” —Andrew Anthony, Guardian (London)

"With the release of Kudos, these three novels can now be appreciated—and will surely be looked back on—as one of the literary masterpieces of our time." —Sebastian Smee, Washington Post

"[Cusks's trilogy is] likely to live on, inflecting our thoughts, offering an experience that feels closer to thinking than to reading." —Lara Feigel, Times Literary Supplement

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture (New York), Bustle, Buzzfeed News, Flavorwire, The Guardian, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and The New Statesman

About The Author

Rachel Cusk is the author of Outline, Transit, Kudos, the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath, and several 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.

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