Transit (2017), has been called “dreamlike” ( Toronto Star), “extraordinary” ( The Daily Telegraph) and “a work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality” ( The New York Times Book Review).

Outline (2015) was a finalist for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Rachel Cusk’s ambitious Outline trilogy has received acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Petty jealousies escalate into irreparable estrangements.“These novels are among the most important written in this century so far.” - The Globe and Mail Death matches over real estate transpire in gentrifying urban neighborhoods. Children are benignly ignored, abused, misunderstood, or at least resented. Women suffer at the hands of manipulative and vindictive men. They treat their spouses or lovers very badly, or are treated even worse. They lie, and proceed to distort their existence, to avoid admitting that everything about them is pretense. People make terrible decisions for reasons they barely understand. Their stories are rarely as brutal as the Russian clerk’s account of seeing his daughter forced to wear the insignia of an official prostitute, but there’s plenty of malice, threat, deception, heartbreak, and damage. In all three books, the narrator, a writer named Faye, who has two sons and is divorced from their father, encounters people-friends, a former lover, distant acquaintances, and total strangers-who, without much prompting, prove eager to tell her their secrets, to uninhibitedly and eloquently recount the most disruptive, wounding, and shameful events in their lives.

The novels in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy- Outline (2015), Transit (2017), and the recently published Kudos-could be described as a succession of Marmeladov moments. By the end of the novel, the unsolicited confession of this “useless worm” will turn out to be the thing that Raskolnikov most needed to hear, partly because it comes to mirror his own concerns in ways he could not have predicted during their initial meeting in the tavern. His beloved daughter has become a prostitute to help feed the family. His long-suffering, consumptive wife, whose stockings he has sold to buy drink, has been beaten up by their exasperated landlord. Ignoring Raskolnikov’s obvious reluctance, Marmeladov skips the small talk and plunges into a monologue that lasts for pages and pages: a rambling, self-lacerating narrative of abject misfortune, poverty, addiction, guilt, shame, helplessness, sin, weakness, and betrayal. Near the beginning of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov wanders into a seedy tavern, where he is approached by a bloated alcoholic wreck: a former clerk who introduces himself as Marmeladov and asks if they might have a polite conversation.

Outline transit kudos