Parade
Rachel Cusk
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Recommended by Victoria
‘This is philosophical fiction at its peak. Parade contains four long chapters that interweave the lives of four different artists – all called G, two men, two women – with the life of the first-person narrator and her husband. Like the characteristic covers, Cusk’s prose is clean and deceptively simple while asking some of the most difficult existential questions: what does it mean to create (produce?) art? Is it anything like creating (producing?) a child? Do the answers to those questions differ depending on whether you are a man or a woman? (Parade’s answer is surely ‘yes’, but in interesting ways.) If we are creations (products?) of our own parents, what do we owe them? In true Cusk fashion, Parade is a novel in which the action is pared down to moments that could be life-changing, if only we recognised them as such.’
From the publisher
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2024
A path-breaking novel of art, womanhood and violence, from the author of the Outline trilogy.
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down.
In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street.
A mother dies. A man falls to his death. Couples seek escape in distant lands.
The new novel from one of the most distinctive writers of the age, Parade sets loose a carousel of lives. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell a true story-about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves.
Cusk pulls off a rare feat: richly philosophical fiction - addressing nothing less ambitious than how to live in relationship with others - in which ideas are so successfully and naturally embedded in the quotidian that the reader can choose whether or not to acknowledge them them. - Claire Messud / New York Times Book Review