DESCRIPTION

From Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, comes this startling, exhilarating novel that once again expands the notion of what fiction can be and do.

Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.

When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

Paradeis a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.

REVIEWS

"[Parade strikes] its notes -- on gender, artmaking, motherhood, freedom, death -- with force . . . Only a master of literary technique can afford to strip characters to their bare, indelible gestures, carved with a needle and bathed in acid, like etchings . . . Cusk's work . . . has this power, to disturb and unsettle, to subtly rearrange the space of one's mind."
—Christine Smallwood, The Washington Post

“[Parade] proves gripping for the way it portrays dynamics that happen in private, even subconsciously, and are sometimes so ordinary that they don't get put into words."
—Emily Watlington, ARTNews

"Readers of Cusk's previous fiction will recognize the masterful way she locates specific personal histories within a relatively abstract narrative framework (minimal details of place, time, and chronology) to unsettle the reader's expectations about what fiction can or should do . . . Cusk's prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights. Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)