The past winner of a Whitbread and a Somerset Maugham Award, Rachel Cusk here completes a literary trilogy with this New York Times Notable Book of 2018, the follow-up to Outline and Transit. A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface. In a literary culture rife with differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona, Faye finds the human story getting lost. She senses a tension between truth and representation among the people she meets—a fissure that becomes a dramatic force as Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering.