Outline has a terribly charged atmosphere, the kind very few novels achieve.” - Charles Finch, The Chicago Tribune “There are dozens of observations in Outline unexpected enough to stop you on the page. The result, which recalls Karl Ove Knausgaard in its effort to melt away the comforting artifice of fiction, is a kind of photonegative portrait of a women who resists concessions in life and art.” - Megan O'Grady, Vogue Outline feels different, its world porous and continuous with ours, though not for the reasons we might expect.” - Elaine Blair, The New Yorker “ is mesmerizing it makes a sharp break from the conventional style of Cusk's previous work. You find yourself pulling the novel closer to your face, as if it were a thriller and the hero were dangling over a snake pit.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times While little happens in Outline, everything seems to happen. “ Outline is a poised and cerebral novel that has little in the way of straightforward plot yet is transfixing in its unruffled awareness of the ways we love and leave each other, and of what it means to listen to other people. But there is nothing blurry or muted about Cusk's literary vision or her prose: Spend much time with this novel and you'll become convinced that she is one of the smartest writers alive.” - Heidi Julavits, The New York Times Book Review reading Outline mimics the sensation of being underwater, of being separated from other people by a substance denser than air. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane.

She meets other visiting writers for dinner.

She leads her students in storytelling exercises. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and MailĬhosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times One of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year. A Finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

Cusk trilogy