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Transit

Rachel Cusk's novel, which follows a writer in the wake of a family collapse, is on the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist.

Rachel Cusk

CBC Books Posted: Mar 09, 2017 10:30 AM EST | Last Updated: November 16, 2018

Transit by Rachel Cusk was on the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist

In the wake of family collapse, a writer moves to London with her two young sons. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions personal, moral, artistic, practical as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life.

Rachel Cusk on honouring the strangeness of living

Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist,Transitsees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novelOutline, and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this precise, short, and yet epic novel, Cusk manages to describe the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life, through a narrative near-silence that draws language toward it. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one's life and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real. (FromHarperCollins Publishers)

How Rachel Cusk rewrote the writing rules and scored two Scotiabank Gller Prize nominations

From the book

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.

She could sense the email continued that I had lost my way in life, that I sometimes struggled to find meaning in my present circumstances and to feel hope for what was to come; she felt a strong personal connection between us, and while she couldn't explain the feeling, she knew too that some things ought to defy explanation. She understood that many people closed their minds to the meaning of the sky above their heads, but she firmly believed I was not one of those people. I did not have the blind belief in reality that made others ask for concrete explanations. She knew that I had suffered sufficiently to begin asking certain questions, to which as yet I had received no reply.

From Transit by Rachel Cusk 2017. Published by HarperCollins.

Transit

Rachel Cusk

From the book

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Other books by Rachel Cusk