Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials.
From this, the first sentence of Rachel Cusk’s Outline, I was hooked. It is an engrossing, mesmerising and transcendent read. Trippy, in the best way. Outline made me want to go to Greece to drink inky coffee in hot, dark cafés, being talked to by self-absorbed but interesting artistic types with strong views and good stories.
The plot is a thin, straight line: the narrator – an author and divorced mother of two – goes to Athens to teach a creative-writing course for a week. Each person she meets (a Greek businessman, an Irish writer, an old friend, a publisher, a poet) and each of her ten students tells a story about their life. Continue reading