Awards

• Short-listed for Whitbread Prize (Novel) 2003
• Shortlisted for Whitbread Prize (Novel) 2003.

Overview

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.'

Full Product Details

9781857029130

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Reviews

'The Lucky Ones has a theme equal to its author's wit, intelligence and genius for observation. This novel is not a particularly comfortable place to be, partly because it's so much like life and partly because Rachel Cusk is brilliant at depicting unattractive characters. But anyone who has ever lived in a family will relish it.' Cressida Connolly, Daily Telegraph 'Her prose is measured and poised. She shares Virginia Woolf's interest in making art out of the minutiae of women's inner monologues.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer 'Compelling, profound and crafted in precise prose dripping with wit.' John Harding, Daily Mail 'You want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch.' Independent 'Restrained, elegant and fiercely observant.' Jane Shillilng, Daily Telegraph 'Impressively written' Marie Claire 'Cusk's writing unsettles by transforming the everyday into a strange and frightening place. She has taken old concerns and given them new life. All this is accomplished with her startling prose!The nuances of relationships, of motives which cannot be understood, are given voice, and it is a magical one.' Kath Murphy, Scotland on Sunday Cusk's is a unique voice! her observations are so intelligent and multi-layered! her style has a rhythm that sucks you in and pulls you along! An intelligent read from a stong feminist voice of our times.' Time Out 'This is not a book about the joy of families, but one which will be recognised by anyone who has children as being full of uncomfortable truth.' Lesley Garner, Evening Standard

Authors sometimes begin their books with a quote from a better-known writer, perhaps hoping to invite some kind comparison with reviewers. Often this conceit (in both senses) is misguided, serving only to point up the differences between the illustrious and the ordinary. Here, Cusk has chosen a quote by Katherine Mansfield, and it must be said that if there were ever a young British writer capable of holding a torch to Mansfield, it would be Cusk. Two of her three previous novels have won awards and The Lucky Ones, structured as a series of interlinked and overlapping short stories, is well up to standard, with the beautifully observed vignettes of everyday life and the precision of language that are Cusk's hallmarks. The book begins with a birth, traumatic and unwelcome. The birth in question is an event to be delayed as soon as possible because the young mother, in prison for a murder she did not commit, knows that the moment the baby is born and ceases to be part of her they will be separated. The campaigning lawyer who was seeking to win her a place in an oversubscribed mother-and-baby unit has become ill, and the child will now be placed with foster parents. This ambivalence over birth and motherhood continues the theme, of course, of the author's recent non-fiction book, A Life's Work, which dealt with her own feelings about becoming a mother for the first time. Babies and motherhood are recurring themes through the rest of the stories: an overbearing mother has mixed feelings about her bohemian daughter's attitude to her baby; a young father leaves his wife and young child to go skiing with friends; the campaigning lawyer in the background of the first story moves to the country with his wife, a newspaper columnist, and she strikes up an unusual friendship with a local woman. Unlike the many writers who stick to a familiar setting, Rachel Cusk seems equally sensitive to the realities of life on a sink estate to those of an impoverished middle-class mother in an abusive relationship, trying to keep up appearances to her village neighbours, and her sympathetic portraits mean that you really care what happens to her finely drawn characters. (Kirkus UK)

'The Lucky Ones has a theme equal to its author's wit, intelligence and genius for observation. This novel is not a particularly comfortable place to be, partly because it's so much like life and partly because Rachel Cusk is brilliant at depicting unattractive characters. But anyone who has ever lived in a family will relish it.' Cressida Connolly, Daily Telegraph 'Her prose is measured and poised. She shares Virginia Woolf's interest in making art out of the minutiae of women's inner monologues.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer 'Compelling, profound and crafted in precise prose dripping with wit.' John Harding, Daily Mail 'You want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch.' Independent 'Restrained, elegant and fiercely observant.' Jane Shillilng, Daily Telegraph 'Impressively written' Marie Claire 'Cusk's writing unsettles by transforming the everyday into a strange and frightening place. She has taken old concerns and given them new life. All this is accomplished with her startling prose!The nuances of relationships, of motives which cannot be understood, are given voice, and it is a magical one.' Kath Murphy, Scotland on Sunday Cusk's is a unique voice! her observations are so intelligent and multi-layered! her style has a rhythm that sucks you in and pulls you along! An intelligent read from a stong feminist voice of our times.' Time Out 'This is not a book about the joy of families, but one which will be recognised by anyone who has children as being full of uncomfortable truth.' Lesley Garner, Evening Standard

Author Information

Rachel Cusk is the author of six novels and one memoir. The first, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, is a personal exploration of motherhood. Other works include The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, In the Fold, and Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

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