“Outline is startlingly unique. A future classic. Cusk offers a boundless volley of unchartered truths of the human psyche. She is jarring, visceral, wise. Outline refuses to pander to expectation, resulting in a stubborn, sideways type of literary perfection.” Grace Dent, Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015 judge.
A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, 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 more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.
Hamnet
An American Marriage - 2019 Winner
Home Fire - 2018 Winner
The Power - 2017 Winner
The Glorious Heresies - 2016 Winner
How to be both - 2015 Winner
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - 2014 Winner
May We Be Forgiven - 2013 Winner
The Song of Achilles - 2012 Winner
The Tiger's Wife - 2011 Winner
The Lacuna - 2010 Winner
Home - 2009 Winner
The Road Home - 2008 Winner
Half of a Yellow Sun - 2007 Winner
On Beauty - 2006 Winner
We Need to Talk About Kevin - 2005 Winner
Small Island - 2004 Winner
Property - 2003 Winner
Bel Canto - 2002 Winner
The Idea of Perfection - 2001 Winner
When I Lived in Modern Times - 2000 Winner
A Crime in the Neighborhood - 1999 Winner
Larry’s Party - 1998 Winner
Fugitive Pieces - 1997 Winner
A Spell of Winter - 1996 Winner
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