Outline

Outline follows a writer named Faye as she travels to Athens to teach a writing course.

The novel consists of conversations about relationships Faye has with various people she meets in Athens. She remains quite passive, observing and listening as others reveal intimate details about their lives. Here and there she reflects about her own life. 

Goodreads

Quote

The image of the family on the boat, the bright rotating circle on the jewellery box, so mechanically and fixedly constellated and yet so graceful and correct, turned behind my eyes.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was.
‘I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,’ he replied. ‘You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,’ he added, ‘it would be much worse the other way around.’

His parents were both Greeks, he continued, but at a certain moment they had relocated the whole household – themselves, four sons, their own parents and an assortment of uncles and aunts – to London, and had begun to conduct themselves in the style of the English upper classes, sending the four boys away to school and establishing a home that became a forum for advantageous social connections, with an inexhaustible stream of aristocrats, politicians and money-makers crossing the threshold. I asked how it was that they had gained access to this foreign milieu, and he shrugged.

Details:

• author: Rachel Cusk
• full title: Outline
• genre: literary fiction
  
• format/type: bookfiction
• country: UK
• series: Outline #1
  
• topics: #relationships, #families
• publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  
• publish date: January 13, 2015
• pages: 258

Literary Awards:

• Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2015), 
• Governor General's Literary Awards / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général Nominee for Fiction (2015), 
• Women's Prize for Fiction Nominee (2015), 
• Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2016), 
• Goldsmiths Prize Nominee (2014), 
• Writers' Prize Nominee (2015), 
• Metų verstinė knyga Nominee for Fiction (2022)

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙💙.5

About the Author:  

Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.

Cusk is the Whitbread Award–winning author of two memoirs, including The Last Supper, and seven novels, including Arlington Park, Saving Agnes, The Temporary, The Country Life, and The Lucky Ones.

She has won and been shortlisted for numerous prizes: her most recent novel, Outline (2014), was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmith's Prize and the Bailey's prize, and longlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'

She lives in Brighton, England.