Saving Agnes - Hardcover

Rachel Cusk

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333588975 ISBN 13: 9780333588970

Publisher: MacMillian (London), 1993

Synopsis

Agnes Day - sub-editor, failure extraordinaire - is unwell. Terminally middle-class, incurably romantic and chronically confused by life's most basic equations, Agnes discovers gaps in her general education which make recovery unlikely. This book won the Whitbread First Novel Award.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Cusk is also the author of The Country Life. She lives in Oxford.

From Publishers Weekly

After the critical success of The Country Life, Cusk's American audience should relish the opportunity to read her Whitbread Prize-winning debut novel, first published in Britain in 1993. Here, too, a na?ve young woman is the heroine of a compelling and eloquent tale about her devastating first love affair, and her emergence, newly independent, into the adult world. Agnes Day lives in London with her friends Nina and Merlin, buddies since Oxford, and works at a magazine called Diplomat's Week. Agnes hates her name, and the ordinariness of her life. Longing for love, she thinks she has found her opportunity in John, a handsome, somewhat mysterious man whose suave nonchalance is matched by his subtle perversity. As in The Country Life, Cusk reveals bits and pieces of the affair through Agnes's memories, a device that allows her to show how scenes from their relationship come back to haunt Agnes after the breakup. Hidden to the reader, as it was to Agnes, is a crucial secret about John that her friends kept from her. Cusk writes witty and winding sentences that are a joy to read, once one gets past the first chapters of the novel, where they are frustratingly unrelieved by plot. However, as the complications of the storyAthe affair, the dramas at the magazine, the roommate problemsAassume clear focus, the narrative becomes engrossing. Quirky but appealing characters and wry social commentary enliven the narrative, and Cusk's use of telling detail is exquisite and sometimes diabolical. The dialogue is often hilarious, illuminating even minor characters with pithy ?lan. Readers will find themselves plugging for the hapless but increasingly feisty AgnesAand savoring Cusk's rich explorations into the life of a young woman whose view of the world is never rosy, but who, in the book's closing scenes, comes to understand that future happiness can lurk in an event as ordinary as a bus ride.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacMillian (London)
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333588975
• ISBN 13: 9780333588970
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256