Transit : A Novel
Author(s): Rachel Cusk
**FINALIST for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; FINALIST for the Goldsmiths Prize; a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year; A New York Times Notable Book of the Year**
“A work of stunning beauty, deep insight and great originality.” —The New York Times
“Brave and uncompromising. . . . A work of cut-glass brilliance.” —Financial Times
“Cusk’s writing feels, exhilaratingly, unlike any other fiction being written.” —Toronto Star
Internationally acclaimed author and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Rachel Cusk returns with Transit, a powerful novel that captures a woman’s experience with the fear and hope that accompany unavoidable change.
Faye has moved to London with her two young sons in the wake of family collapse. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, practical—as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.
Filtered through the impersonal gaze of the keenly intelligent Faye, Transit sees Rachel Cusk offer up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility and the mystery of change. In this precise yet epic novel, Cusk manages to describe the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life, through a narrative near-silence that draws language toward it. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.
“An extraordinary piece of writing—stunningly bold, original and humane.” —The Daily Telegraph
Review(s):
“Beautiful.”
“Cusk is a master of sparse, exquisite prose. . . . [Outline] successfully conveys all of her admirable honesty in the safe harbour of fiction, and somehow delivers more human truths than most memoirs ever could.”
“A stellar accomplishment.”
“Quietly radical. . . . Ingenious.”
“One of the most daringly original and entertaining pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.”
“Mesmerizing.”
“Brave and uncompromising in its literary ambition, Transit is a work of cut-glass brilliance that quietly insists on the reader’s thoughtful attention. One beautifully crafted sentence follows another.”
“[Transit’s] themes of transience and dislocation are contiguous with a broader conversation about the fluidity of identity resulting, in part, from an increasingly—and contentiously (see Brexit, Trump, etc.)—borderless planet.”
“One of our most astute writers. . . . Cusk is very good at creating characters who seem fresh; they blossom under her pen. . . . This is part of what makes [Transit] so effective and smart.”
“Cusk is now working on a level that makes it very surprising that she has not yet won a major literary prize. Her technical originality is equaled by the compelling nature of her subject matter, and Transit is a very fine novel indeed.”
ISBN: 9781443456029