Outline

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 voice 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. Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place (Prix Femina étranger), the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction, including her most recent novel Parade (Goldsmiths Prize, 2024). She is a Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of the 2024 Malaparte Prize, and has been awarded the title of Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres. She lives in Paris.