Outline - Tapa blanda

"One of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of fiction I've ever read" (Observer)

"Mesmerising" (New Yorker)

"Brilliant...absorbing, thought-provoking" (Evening Standard)

"Rachel Cusk breaks all the rules... Outline captivates" (Independent)

"If life were fair, Rachel Cusk would win every prize going for Outline " (Julie Myerson Observer)

"Winter bouquets should be offered to the clever and stylish Rachel Cusk: her novel Outline is smoothly accomplished, and fascinating both on the surface and in its depths" (Hilary Mantel Guardian)

"Outline succeeds powerfully. Among other things, it gets a great variety of human beings down on to 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)

"A clever thought experiment that’s far too readable ever to feel like one" (Sunday Times)

"A piece of work of great beauty and ambition. Narratives are smoothed, as if by translation and retranslation, into their simplest, barest elements: parents, children, divorces, cakes, dresses, dogs. These elements then build, layer on layer, to form the most complex and exquisitely detailed patterns, swirling and whirling, wheels within wheels" (London Review of Books)

"Cool but compelling, narrow in focus perhaps, but deep in thought" (Scotsman)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

A woman arrives in Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Once there, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives.

Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voices begins to weave a complex human tapestry: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE, THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE AND LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC PRIZE