Yesterday, I spotted Life of M on NetGalley. It’s the next novel by Rachel Cusk, the acclaimed, best-selling author of the Outline Trilogy and many others. I haven’t actually read anything by Cusk (not actually sure why), but the synopsis for this next book caught my attention. I’ve popped it on my anticipated list, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. Here’s the synopsis:

M is a famous actor. She has been famous since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. Over time she has grown so accustomed to being recognized that not to be recognized comes as a rare surprise.

This might be why she agrees to let a stranger write her biography, a stranger who knows nothing of M and yet resembles her uncannily. The project they embark upon together sprawls and expands, to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days, across hotel rooms and bourgeois facades and film sets, through the endless modern cities whose beauty requires great suffering, whose ugliness holds great beauty.

Out of the bewildering torrent of the present, Rachel Cusk has fashioned a new kind of literature. What begins with a collision between two people — M, and the ordinary stranger who begins to tell her story — evolves into a chronicle of modern life, a choral investigation into how we might find what is significant within the wreck of the ordinary. This is a novel stripped of artifice, that takes our emptiness and fills it with grace. It is a shocking achievement.

Rachel Cusk’s Life of M is due to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in North America (August 25th) and Faber & Faber in the UK (August 28th).

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