Arlington Park

Arlington Park

A Sunday Times (London) Top 100 Novel of the Twenty-First Century “No one has written better about what, I suppose, is generally known as female experience . . . All of it is familiar from life but not (thus far) from literature. Everything about Arlington Park is original and fearless.” ―Francine Prose, Bookforum Set over the course of one rainy day in an ordinary English suburb, Arlington Park is a viciously funny portrait of a group of young mothers, each bound to their families, each straining for some kind of independence: Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; Solly, about to give birth to her fourth child; Maisie, struggling to accept provincial life; and Christine, the optimist and host of a dinner party where the neighbors come together. Penetrating and empathetic, Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park is “a domestic adventure about the perils of modern privilege that is as smartly satirical as it is warmly wise” ( Elle ). “Everything about Arlington Park is original and fearless.” ― Francine Prose, Bookforum “Hideously funny . . . A novel with a sense of rightness at its core and a narrative intelligence so swift and piercing it can take your breath away.” ― The Boston Globe “Her books are smart and deep, telling tales of urban life that are the twenty-first-century version of Austen or Thackeray. . . . Cusk's depictions and evaluations are spot-on, her language smooth and enthralling.” ― Baltimore Sun “Cusk's glory is her style, cold and hard and devastatingly specific, empathetic but not sympathetic.” ― Los Angeles Times “Cusk's frank acknowledgment of maternal ambivalence is rare and wonderful.” ― Entertainment Weekly “Sharp wit and commanding prose.” ― The New York Times “Devastating . . . Incisively vivid.” ― Publishers Weekly Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America. She is the author of six novels. The first, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. In The Lucky Ones (2003) she uses a series of five narratives, loosely linked by the experience of parenthood, to write of life's transformations, of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her latest novel is Outline (2014).