Rachel Cusk

Faye travels to Athens to teach a creative writing course. She has a series of conversations — on the plane, with students, with a man she meets for dinner twice. She tells the reader almost nothing about herself directly. What emerges is a portrait in negative space: we understand who Faye is from the lives she encounters and the questions she asks.

The second novel of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. Faye has returned to London from Athens and bought a flat she is renovating. She has more conversations — with a hairdresser, an old university friend, a fellow writer, her downstairs neighbours. The construction of a home becomes the novel's structuring metaphor for the question of rebuilding a self.