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On Marriage and Separation
by Rachel Cusk
In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life's Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Widely acclaimed, the book started hundreds of arguments that continue to this day. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce's tremendous impact on the lives of women.
An unflinching chronicle of Cusk's own recent separation and the upheaval that followed - "a jigsaw dismantled" - it is also a vivid study of divorce's complex place in our society. "Aftermath" originally signified a second harvest, and in this book, unlike any other written on the subject, Cusk discovers opportunity as well as pain. With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Rachel Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with an acuity and wit that will help us understand our own.
"Starred Review. Striking... Startling... Unflinching... Bold, gripping, original and occasionally darkly funny." - Kirkus Reviews
"In this thought-provoking memoir, Cusk musters her considerable literary powers to mine a complex terrain filled with heartbreak and doubt... Interspersed within the narrative are stories within stories, vivid scenes, and piercing observations." - Publishers Weekly
"A penetrating exploration of gender roles in the context of marriage and family and how the dissolution of a marriage changes a person's relationship with others." - Booklist
"Artful and nuanced... [Cusk] has the novelist's saving graces - honesty, courage, and the ability to depict her experiences in exquisitely crafted language... Her exacting, cerebral treatment of such a highly-charged subject is what makes it of literary value." - The Independent (UK)
"Brilliant... Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights." - The Observer (UK)
"Unflinching and beautifully wrought... Cusk uses the [memoir] form with great tact and writerly panache. She is at once probing and reticent, mustering her scenes and images to convey the truth of enmeshed lives and loves... [Aftermath is] full of beauty - the beauty of language struggling to reveal an experience which is complex and scored with doubts and pain." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Startlingly insightful... Rachel Cusk's writing has quietly thrilled me for years with its intelligence, perception and understated power: ordinary people's flaws are depicted vividly yet without fanfare in brittle, brilliant prose... As always with Cusk, it's exhilarating to feel stimulated, to have fabulous phrases and similes cause pulses of pleasure." - The Independent on Sunday (UK)
"Readers who admire the difficult discipline of self-scrutiny will find precision, beauty and a complicated truth in Cusk's narrative." - New Statesman (UK)
This information about Aftermath 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.
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