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by Rachel Cusk
From Rachel Cusk, her first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art.
Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three "literary masterpieces" (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions.
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta ("Every so often, for offenses actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There's a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it's called being sent to Coventry"), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.
"Readers of the author's first-person fiction will be pleased with the acutely observant narrative voice that characterizes these introspective meditations on family, motherhood, marriage, and community...An eloquent and engrossing selection of nonfiction writing." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Memoirist and novelist Cusk turns her perceptive gaze and distinctive voice to a variety of topics in her arresting first essay collection." - Publishers Weekly
"Impressive and wonderful. Rachel Cusk sees the truth where the rest of us can only make out shadows. Coventry is Cusk's theory of forms." - Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
This information about Coventry was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.
If you liked Coventry, try these:
by Erika J.. Simpson
Published 2026
From "a writer who's absolutely going places" (Roxane Gay), a remarkable, inventive debut memoir about a mother-daughter relationship across cycles of poverty, separation, and illness, exploring how we forge identity in the face of imminent loss.
by Rachel Cusk
Published 2022
From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships.
by Natasha Trethewey
Published 2021
A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.
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