A family drama where the characters spend their time analysing themselves and their roles in the family. Funny and sad this novel will have you analysing your own place in life and looking at what influences and creates who you are. A thoughtful and thought provoking book.
'At times I just wanted to punch the air in a frenzy of delighted recognition.' Julie Myerson 'She makes you know exactly what it is like to live inside the skin of a particular character, on a certain day, in all its richness.' Daily Telegraph 'Cusk's writing is so beautiful that I would happily read her account of a trip to the shops on a rainy morning.' Literary Review
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy-enough daughter and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the ageing Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
‘Cusk is both clever and precise at providing realistic snippets of modern family life. She places a wry, elegiac microscope on the trappings of convention.’ Diana Evans, Financial Times
Author
About Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk was born to English parents in Canada in 1967, and spent most of her early childhood in Los Angeles. On coming to England in 1975, she was sent to a Catholic convent school in Cambridge before reading English at New College, Oxford. After graduation, she lived and worked in Madrid for a year before travelling in Central America. Her first novel Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993. She is also the author of The Temporary and Country Life. Rachel now lives permanently in North London, concentrating on her writing, as well reviewing regularly for The Times and TLS.
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