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.

• Rachel Cusk on honouring the strangeness of living

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.

Outlineis 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. (From Picado)

From the book

Interviews

Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists read the first line of their book

9 years ago

Duration 3:37

The five Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists - Andr Alexis, Samuel Archibald, Rachel Cusk, Heather ONeill and Anakana Schofield - read the first line of their nominated book and tell CBC Arts why they chose that sentence as their all-important opener.

Other books by Rachel Cusk