Author(s): Rachel Cusk

General Fiction

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.

Matilda Bookshop Review

Told in five distinct parts, Parade, is an exploration of art and artmaking: who gets to claim the artmaking space, and at what costs to a life. Drawing on the biographies of actual living and dead artists, Cusk casts her excoriating eye over the ways in which the physical body is implicated and intersects with artmaking, mothering, birthing and dying. Philosophical in tone, this is also a howl against patriarchy warping creative spaces at women's abnegation. MOLLY