Outline

Cusk’s narrator goes to Athens to teach a writing course and mostly listens. The novel is built from conversations — with strangers on planes, with students, with an ex-husband — and what emerges is a portrait of a person assembled entirely from the edges of other people’s stories. It is formally radical and completely absorbing.

The Outline trilogy (this, Transit, Kudos) is one of the defining achievements of contemporary British fiction. Start here. The restraint is the point — Cusk strips away everything that usually makes a novel feel like a novel, and what’s left is somehow more real.