Author(s): Rachel Cusk

Fiction

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. 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 great a great loss. Outline is the first book in a short and yet epic cycle - a masterful trilogy which will be remembered as one of the most significant achievements of our times. 'Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on the page with both immediacy and depth; an elemental pleasure that makes the book as gripping to read as a thriller... A stellar accomplishment.' James Lasdun, Guardian

CONSTANT READER STAFF  REVIEW: RICHARD

What’s Outline about? Ostensibly it’s about a young writer traveling to Athens to teach a summer writing course, particularly the conversations she has with strangers.

What’s it really about? Good question! The narrator recounts stories she’s told, many of which turn into stories of stories, with a cold, formal precision that creates a hypnotic, dreamlike state. Ordinary stories begin to converge on themes like the difficulty of maintaining family relationships and the artists’ struggle to keep a creative spark in a mundane world.

This happens against an evocative backdrop of a sweltering Athens. The clinical prose reminds of Murnane, Ballard, Delillo or particularly W.G. Sebald. It took a few chapters for Outline to really click, but once it did I found it, to use my least-favourite reviewer’s word, unputdownable.