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Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
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Searching... Looscan | Adult | Fiction | Book | CUSK | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Agnes Day is mildly discontent... she's living with her two best friends in London and working at a trade magazine. Life and love seem to go on without her. Not only does she not know how to get back into the game, she isn't even sure what the game is. But she gives a good performance - until she learns that her roommates and her boyfriend are keeping secrets from her, and that her boss is quitting and leaving her in charge. In great despair, she decides to make it her business to set things straight."--Publisher description.
Author Notes
Rachel Cusk was born on Feb 8, 1967 in Canada. She spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles and finished her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. That year she published The Lucky Ones (2003), her fourth novel, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. Since then she has published four more novels; her latest is Outline (2014). She has also written several non-fiction books. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) is a memoir about time in southern Italy. In 2015 she made the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist with her title Outline.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 nave 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 storyÄthe affair, the dramas at the magazine, the roommate problemsÄassume 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 AgnesÄand 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. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Razor-sharp, mordant prose--some of it wildly funny--etches the story of twentysomething Agnes Day. Oxford educated, from a perfectly nice family, she shares her London home with two mates from college: Nina, radically sociofeminist, and Merlin, large, kind, distracted. Agnes works as an underling at Diplomat's Week, with a harridan boss and an offbeat coworker. She thinks of herself as "in recovery" from an unfortunate relationship, but, in fact, she is not so much in recovery as in the midst of the jigsaw puzzle of life: trying to piece together bits from her childhood, random acts of maturity, the daily round of commuting, working, trips to the pub, and walks past the homeless into a recognizable picture of what it means to be an adult. She's convinced everyone else holds the secret to real life, which she somehow missed. She muddles through, and we with her, to somewhat better things and definitely better choices. Having stifled the urge to tell Agnes to snap out of it, we can cheer her getting with it. --GraceAnne A. DeCandido
Library Journal Review
The hearty welcome American readers gave The Country Life has prompted this U.S. publication of Cusk's 1993 Whitbread First Novel Award winnerÄa decision certain to please many on this side of the Atlantic. In this modern-day satire of a Bunyanesque journey, Cusk places heroine Agnes Day, fresh from university studies, in the thick of London life and the working world, accompanied by housemates Nina and Merlin. Although her salvation is illusive, coming, finally, in the form of self-understanding, it is the pilgrimage itself, portrayed with a blend of introspective intensity, darkly comic situations, and a striking use of language, that is most satisfying. With such a tour-de-force of style and content, one is left to wonder whether Jane Austen herself could find room for improvement if she were writing today. Highly recommended.ÄNancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
