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Published Jan 2007
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb very much like its American counterparts, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilization: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. In Arlington Park, men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. It's a world awash in contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. How are they to know right from wrong? How should they use their knowledge of other people's sufferings? What is the relationship of politics to their own domestic arrangements?
Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives .... Darkly comic, deeply affecting, and wise, Arlington Park is a page-turning imagining of the extraordinary inner nature of ordinary life, by one of Britain's most exciting young novelists.
"Starred Review. In this devastating ensemble novel, Whitbread Award–winner Cusk (Saving Agnes) exposes the roiling inner lives and not-so-quiet desperation of young mothers in the well-to-do London suburb Arlington Park." - PW.
"They're not always good company - this reviewer threw the book down halfway through, swearing to get out of town - but in her luminous if disturbing study Cusk has done important work in giving them voice. Highly recommended." - Library Journal.
"The sour aftertaste their stories leave, however, is a new development in Cusk's work - and not a welcome one. Accomplished, honest and uncompromising, but not a whole lot of fun." - Kirkus.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rachel Cusk is the author of the trilogy Outline, Transit and Kudos; the memoirs A Life's Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath; and several other novels: Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; The Bradshaw Variations; and Second Place. She was chosen as one of Granta's 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She is a Guggenheim fellow and she lives in Paris.
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