Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.
A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax.
In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.
'Few fictional projects in recent years have been as subtly shape-shifting as [this] trilogy ... Does the final book fulfil the expressive potential of an undertaking that implicitly insists that such expression be withheld? ... The closing scene, in my opinion, clinches the verdict triumphantly and - this is crucial - incidentally.' (Geoff Dyer Daily Telegraph)
'The pleasure of this project is a rare one: it is the pleasure of a person figuring out exactly what she ought to be doing. Here is the exhilaration of someone fully claiming an exploitative gift.' (Patricia Lockwood LRB)
'It's addictive, sharing such a strange, bright vision of the world; and Kudos, this final part of the Faye trilogy, has been eagerly awaited . . . it is a fine novel that deserves to receive . . . a heap of awards in recognition of the vast achievement of the trilogy.' (Kate Clanchy Guardian)
