Rachel Cusk has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 56 ratings. The most-rated is Outline.
Outline
Summary
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 talking - about 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 people's 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 Cusk's finest work yet and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
©2015 Rachel Cusk (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Transit
Summary
The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 best books of 2015. In the wake of her family's collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic, and practical - as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic, cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one's life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.
©2016 Rachel Cusk (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Kudos
Summary
Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power. A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax. In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.
©2018 Rachel Cusk (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
The Country Life
Summary
Winner of England's Whitbread Award for Saving Agnes and the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award, Rachel Cusk has won popular and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. This young British author's beguiling novel is both poignant and hilarious. When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her. Jenny Sterlin sparkles in her role as the irrepressible Stella. Even in the face of Stella's angst and touching vulnerability, you will find it impossible to stifle your laughter.
©1997 Rachel Cusk (P)1999 Recorded Books
Omrids
Summary
En trykkende varm sommer tager forfatteren Faye til Athen for at undervise i et skrivekursus. Allerede i flyet på vej derned begynder livshistorierne at udfolde sig omkring hende, og hendes rejse bliver en rejse ind i andre menneskers fortællinger. Som en tom beholder med et lyttende øre lader hun sig udfylde af andres historier. Selvom der næsten intet røbes om Faye selv, tegner der sig gennem hendes spørgsmål og de mange samtaler et billede af en kvinde, der forsøger at komme sig over et stort tab.
©2020 Gyldendal (P)2020 Gyldendal
Coventry
Summary
From Rachel Cusk, her first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the listener. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.
©2019 Rachel Cusk (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Saving Agnes
Summary
The story of a young British woman's first affair and entry into adulthood.
©2001 Rachel Cusk (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC