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.
Read an excerpt here.
Praise for Kudos
The Best Fiction for 2018, The Guardian • 30 Best Books to Read this Summer, Elle • 30 Summer Books to Get Excited About, Buzzfeed • 20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read, The Toronto Star • 10 Most Exciting Book Releases for 2018, Vulture • Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018, Chicago Reader • Los Angeles Review of Books June Book Club Pick
“[Cusk] has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears . . . These books—all right, let’s call them the Outline trilogy—strike me as a stark, modern, adamantine new skyscraper on the literary horizon.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“The exhilarating finale of Rachel Cusk’s magnificently unclassifiable trilogy of novels . . . With her typical acerbic wit, Ms Cusk skewers the pretensions of the literary world while simultaneously upholding the intrinsic value of literature—no small feat . . . A daring bonfire of hypocrisies and emotions.” —The Economist
“Cusk commandeers reality . . . An object lesson in rigor, elegance, and fury.” —Merve Emre, Harper’s
“The darkly stirring conclusion to the acclaimed Outline trilogy.” —O Magazine
Rachel Cusk is the author of Outline, Transit, the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath, and several other 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.