Author(s): Rachel Cusk

Novel

A writer hides. A mother dies. A woman is attacked.

In Parade, Rachel Cusk creates a new documentary voice that operates on the border between fiction and reality. It braids imagined characters with the actual, experience with the philosophical, to altering effect.

Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street.

A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands.

The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a true story-about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves.

"Cusk continues to refuse to pull even a wisp of wool over her own – or anyone else’s – eyes. Self-consciously original, inward and undeterred, she has become ever more persistently determined to write about life precisely as she finds it, and in Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat. ... no one else can do what she does in the way that she does it. Parade takes her experiment further: it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent." —The Guardian