Crafted by the exhilarating mind of Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, Parade disturbs and defines the novel.

Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. The attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a woman dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they have inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. 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. A writer and a visionary like no other, Rachel Cusk turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

Rachel Cusk is the author of nine novels, three non-fiction works, a play, and numerous shorter essays and memoirs. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, was published in 1993. Her most recent novel, Kudos, the final part of the Outline trilogy, will be published in the US and the UK in May 2018.
Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Country Life won the Somerset Maugham Award and subsequent books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Whitbread Prize, Goldsmiths Prize, Bailey’s Prize, and the Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award in Canada. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. Her version of Euripides’ Medea was directed by Rupert Goold and was shortlisted for the Susan Blackburn Smith Award.
Rachel was born in Canada in 1967 and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles before moving to the UK in 1974. She studied English at Oxford and published her first novel Saving Agnes when she was twenty six, and its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. In responding to the formal problems of the novel representing female experience she began to work additionally in non-fiction. Her autobiographical accounts of motherhood and divorce (A Life’s Work and Aftermath) were groundbreaking and controversial. 
Most recently, after a long period of consideration, she attempted to evolve a new form, one that could represent personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention. That project became a trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos). Outline was one of The New York Times’ top 5 novels in 2015. Judith Thurman’s 2017 profile of Rachel in The New Yorker comments “Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics of storytelling, but Cusk has found a way to do so without sacrificing its tension. Where the action meanders, language takes up the slack. Her sentences hum with intelligence, like a neural pathway.”

Rachel Cusk's profile page

"A homage to brokenness, Parade is serrated and shattering?—?jagged, cut, refracted, and indifferent to being whole. With bold force, Cusk captures something unsettling and true about identity: moments of clarity are as lonely, fleeting, and painful as an unexpected blow." — The Literary Review of Canada

“Parade will resonate with fans of Cusk’s novels Outline, Transit and Kudos, which made waves for the same quiet but unrelenting voice....Through her characters, Cusk shows us that art can be the site of violence, and also at times, the only medium through which to save oneself from it.” — Associated Press

“Parade is a novel composed of broken-down shapes and disintegrating shadows, sometimes as ugly and revealing as the nude that G paints of his devoted wife....But in this diffuse novel about the dissolution of the self and the multiple personalities required to be Woman, Artist, Wife, Mother, Daughter, Cusk shows us how we might start to undress.” — The Walrus