Agnes Day - sub-editor, failure extraordinaire - is unwell. Terminally middle-class, incurably romantic and chronically confused by life's most basic equations, Agnes discovers gaps in her general education which make recovery unlikely. This book won the Whitbread First Novel Award.

Saving Agnes

Literature & Fiction

Rachel Cusk

Contemporary

MacMillian (London)

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. This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60 per cent of the author's work and as low as 30 per cent with characters and plotlines removed.

Bradshaw Variations

Imprint unknown

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. Their three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, the Piero della Francesca trail and the tourist furnaces of Amalfi, the simple glories of pasta and gelato. Through the lens of Italian culture, landscape, and cuisine, Rachel Cusk reconsiders our impulses toward indulgence and escape, inspiration and succor, creativity and domestic life.

The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

Travel

Europe

Faber and Faber

<p>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.</p>

Country Life

Faber&Faber

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. In the months that followed, life as she had known it came apart, "like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces". Aftermath chronicles this perilous journey as the author redefines herself as a single woman and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement and the absence of a clear authority. "I can't remember what it feels like to be at ease. This ceaseless effort to manufacture normality is a kind of forger's art, so laborious compared with the facility that created the original." The pressure to reconstruct a 'normal' life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all. Aftermathis a masterly work in which the author, at her most candid and rigorous, charts the largely unwritten journey back to order from the chaos that is left when a family breaks apart.

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

Parenting & Relationships

Last Supper

Parade

Review from Amazon.com: In Rachel Cusk's The Country Life, city mouse Stella abruptly abandons her London career and man for a job in Sussex. Her mission: to care for and transport young Martin, the disabled son of country mice Piers and Pamela Madden, owners of Franchise Farm. Alas, all is not ambrosia in Arcadia. For a start, the Maddens are, well, maddening. The paterfamilias sports "an expression of bright vacancy on his rosy face" whereas his wife evinces a more dramatic sort of derangement: "Pamela, I realized, spoke a language of energetic emergency, in which problems were approached as violently as they were escaped from." To make matters worse, not only does our heroine lack any background in her new field--she doesn't even know how to drive. Long before she's forced behind the wheel, however, Stella is out of her element. Nature, even the very air, seems against her. In one devastating tour de force, she falls asleep in the sun and is hideously burnt (but only on one side of her body!) and then suffers an indoor avian attack. Fans of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm will recognize more than a few nods to her classic in Rachel Cusk's hilarious and caustic third novel. For a start, the locals are unfailingly lugubrious, and every dog seems to have it in for our girl from the city. As for her young charge, Martin is either an emotional monster or a savior--though we readers might well opt for the former. The Country Life again and again displays Cusk's eye and ear for surreal comedy and social unpleasantry. Suffice it to say that your idea of a pleasant sojourn--or even a brief walk--in the country will never be the same.

The Country Life

Literary

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Books by Rachel Cusk

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rachel Cusk. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Saving Agnes

Bradshaw Variations

The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

Country Life

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

Last Supper

Parade

Parade

The Country Life