Second Place
by Rachel Cusk
Book of the Month
MAY 2021
by Rachel Cusk
Book of the Month
MAY 2021
Second Place
by Rachel Cusk
Book of the Month
MAY 2021
€16.00
BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH selection MAY 2021:
A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy.
A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma—and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.
Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift—and to destroy.
“Her genius is that in deliberately blurring a boundary of her own – that between a writer and her subject, between the expectation of autobiography so often attached to writing by women, and the carapace of pure invention so often unthinkably afforded to men – she tricks us into believing that her preoccupations and failings, her privileges and apparent assumptions, are not our own. By the time we realize what has happened, it is too late: our own surface has been disturbed, our own complacent compartment dismantled. It is a shock, but as the narrator of Second Place reminds us, ‘shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy.’ Cusk is necessary too – deeply so, and Second Place, exquisite in the cruelty of its rightness, reminds us why.”
—Sam Byers, The Guardian