Rachel Cusk books

Anthologies

Non-Fiction

Outline Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Rachel Cusk began publishing fiction in 1993 with Saving Agnes and worked steadily through the tradition of the British novel before breaking sharply with it. Her 2001 memoir A Life’s Work, about early motherhood, proved controversial and brought her a wider readership. She followed it with more memoirs and essays that continued to court discomfort, treating subjects like marriage breakdown with a forensic candour that divided critics.

The Outline trilogy changed how many readers thought about fiction. Using a narrator who reports the lives of the people around her while remaining largely silent about her own inner world, Cusk invented a form that felt genuinely new. All three books were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Outline was cited by the New York Times as one of fifteen books shaping how fiction is written in the twenty-first century.

Her later novels, including Second Place (2021) and Medea (2022), continue to push against conventional narrative, while her standalone work from the 1990s shows the more traditional fiction she wrote before her reinvention.