Outline
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A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talkingтАФabout their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.
Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.
Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates peopleтАЩs motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel CuskтАЩs finest work yet and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
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Rachel Cusk is the author of three memoirsтАФA Life тАЩs Work, The Last Supper, and AftermathтАФand seven 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 GrantaтАЩs 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.
Kate Lock has played Mrs. Linde in The DollтАЩs House, Celia in Captain Oates Left Sock, and several leading roles at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. She co-wrote TuesdayтАЩs Child with Terry Johnson and in it played Teresa Doyle at Theatre Royal, Stratford, and for the BBC. She has also appeared in several television productions, including AyckbournтАЩs Absent Friends, Coronation Street, The Brief, The Bill, and Sweet Nothings, as well as comedy sketches with Rory Bremner, Hale and Pace, and Morecambe & Wise.
