Transit

`An extraordinary piece of writing – stunningly bold, original and humane’ Joanna Kavenna, Daily Telegraph A Guardian / New Statesman / Observer / Spectator Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions – personal, moral, artistic, practical – as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. 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 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.

About the Author :
Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1974. She is the author of nine novels and three works of non-fiction. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: Outline (2014) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Giller Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award. It was also picked by the New York Times as one of the top ten books of the year. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2015 her version of Euripides’ `Medea’ was put on at the Almeida Theatre with Rupert Goold directing and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Review :
"An extraordinary piece of writing – stunningly bold, original and humane." "Rachel Cusk’s new novel is tremendous from its opening sentence … Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force, even rash ... Transit steers with stylishness and grace between the low-lying truths and the significant dramas we compose for ourselves out of the accidents which befall us. Offering no hostages to convention, it’s somehow page-turningly enthralling and charged with the power to move." "Her writing, for all its laconic, pared-back grace, is rich in detail… Cusk is now working on a level that makes it very surprising she has not yet won a major literary prize. Her technical originality is equalled by the compelling nature of her subject matter, and Transit is a very fine novel indeed." "Transfixing…There’s a constant sense of Ms. Cusk’s mind whirling, as if she were forever, in the background, performing an internal disk check. Transit is fat with substance, as August Wilson once said he wanted his plays to be. There’s a lot of humor in its talk." "In her effort to expose the illusions of both fiction and life, [Rachel Cusk] may have discovered the most genuine way to write a novel today."