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 enactment of the creative persona, and she begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation that causes her to consider questions of acclaim, justice, and the ultimate value of suffering. The third in the trilogy that began with Outline, Rachel Cusk's Kudos takes as its theme the relationship between pain and honour, and investigates the moral nature of success as a precept of both art and living.

Author Biography

Rachel Cusk is the author of the memoirs A Life's Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath, and several 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; Outline; and Transit. She was chosen as one of Granta's 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.