The Lucky Ones - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857029135 ISBN 13: 9781857029130

Publisher: HarperCollins Publisher

Synopsis

The much-praised new novel from award-winning author Rachel Cusk, who was one of Granta's Best of British writers.In this profound study of human relationships, five overlapping narratives of love and detachment merge to form a powerful evocation of family identity.A young pregnant woman's misfortune; a new father's disaffection; a daughter's search for lost childhood; a mother's antagonism; a wife's secret suffering - through it all runs the story of Victor Porter, a campaigning lawyer, and his journalist wife Serena, in whose relationship the conflict between the public and the personal, between love and morality, is played out.Rachel Cusk writes of life's transformations; of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life. It illuminates with startling precision the texture and complexity of emotional existence within 'the bustling concourses of life.'

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Cusk is the author of three novels: SAVING AGNES, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, THE TEMPORARY, and THE COUNTRY LIFE, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. Her non-fiction account of becoming a mother, A LIFE'S WORK, was one of the most talked about books of last year.

From Publishers Weekly

Billed as a novel of "overlapping relationships," Whitbread-winner Cusk's evocative latest, with its tenuously connected sections, feels more like a short story collection linked by theme and a few shared characters. Cusk (The Country Life; Saving Agnes) unites her tales via her characters' lonely, isolated conditions and the knotty relationships between parents and children—from Kristy, an imprisoned mother-to-be who gives birth in the back of a squad car in "Confinement," to Mrs. Daley, an unhappy, controlling woman whose need to establish herself as a victim trumps her ability to find or give happiness in "Mrs Daley's Daughter." Cusk's vision of contemporary relationships is a lonely, wintry one, in which people's inner landscapes dominate. This makes for gorgeous, languorous writing in places, but it also restricts the view: the landscapes are so rich with pathos that there isn't always enough room for the range of human emotion so essential to prose that relies on thought instead of action. In "The Sacrifices," a married woman who never had the baby she desired visits her childhood home, now occupied by strangers, and fantasizes about returning to her old room: "I would sit on my bed as the afternoon turned outside the window to night. I would wait for them to call me down." This passivity runs throughout the book, as characters tend toward rumination rather than deed. But as readers come to the end, the lives of Cusk's characters begin to tie together hauntingly. This is not life in all its messy complexity, but a mannered, poignant portrait of the treacheries of domestic life.
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Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publisher
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857029135
• ISBN 13: 9781857029130
• Binding: Paperback