The Lucky Ones - Hardcover

Cusk, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857029127 ISBN 13: 9781857029123

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2003

Synopsis

The long-awaited new novel from the Whitbread Award winning author of SAVING AGNES and THE COUNTRY LIFE, which won her a Somerset Maugham Prize. In this profound study of human relationships, five overlapping narratives of love and detachment merge to form a powerful evocation of family identity.

Children grew up and left and news of them came back like news of a distant war in which they were fighting and from which they were occasionally permitted leave, when they would return for a week or two to wander about as though in a mirage of the past. It often seemed that while they had changed Ravenley had not, but by the time they left that impression had usually been reversed.

Five men and women's lives converge in this powerful and moving story of family relationships.

A young pregnant woman's misfortune; a new father's disaffection; a daughter's search for lost childhood; a mother's antagonism; a wife's secret suffering – through it all runs the story of Victor Porter, a campaigning lawyer, and his journalist wife Serena, in whose relationship the conflict between the public and the personal, between love and morality, is played out.

Rachel Cusk writes of life's transformations; of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life. It illuminates with startling precision the texture and complexity of emotional existence within 'the bustling concourses of life'.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Cusk is the author of six novels and one memoir. The first, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Other works include The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, In the Fold, and Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

From the Back Cover

In this profound study of human relationships, five overlapping narratives of love and detachment merge to form a powerful evocation of family identity.

A young pregnant woman's misfortune; a new father's disaffection; a daughter's search for a lost childhood; a mother's antagonism; a wife's secret suffering – through it all runs the story of Victor Porter, a campaigning lawyer, and his journalist wife, Serena, in whose relationship the conflict between the public and the personal, between love and morality, is played out.

Rachel Cusk writes of life's transformation, of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. 'The Lucky Ones' is a novel about creating and sustaining life. It illuminates with startling precision the texture and complexity of emotional existence within 'the bustling concourses of life'.

On 'A Life's Work'

'As compulsive as a thriller'
Kate Kellaway, 'Observer'

'An incitement to riot. I laughed out loud, often, in painful recognition.'
Esther Freud

'Full of enormous insight and sly wit. Cusk has crafted a work of beauty and wisdom. And belly laughs.'
Suzanne Moore, 'New Statesman'

'Some alchemy of her prose renders this most fascinating and boring of all subjects graceful, eloquent, modest and true.'
Jane Shilling, 'Sunday Telegraph'

On 'The Country Life:'

'This book is a delight. 'The Country Life' is remarkable for two things; its humour and its menace. Its mixture of P.G. Wodehouse, 'Cold Comfort Farm', and Jane Austen is a pleasure to read.'
Tibor Fischer, 'Sunday Express'

'I was addicted. The detail is breathtaking and Cusk's descriptions of a heatwave in the countryside almost had me dripping sweat and scratching the nettle stings. It is also hysterically funny.'
Lisa Jewell'

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857029127
• ISBN 13: 9781857029123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240