Part of the What We Are Reading Now collection of Book Reviews by friends of Essex Book Festival
A Book Review by Louise Barnes
Depicting ten conversations had by our esteemed narrator, the name of which we only find out at the end of the novel, Outline is a novel without a plot, or rather without a start and an end.
The novel begins with a woman on a plane travelling to Athens to teach creative writing and follows her lucid thought process and conversations with various people in her path – neighbours on planes, fellow teachers, friends from previous trips – leading us to see her reality of family, loss and love through her dialogues in classes and dinners and times swimming and sailing during a beautifully hot summer in Athens. And it ends, well does it end or does Cusk just set us up for the next two in the trilogy – Transit and Kudos – I for one am ready to find out.
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