Mireille Juchau

Partly because it's the third of a really stunningly original trilogy by Cusk.

And having read some of her early work, both her novels and her memoirs,

It's such a departure from both, although it seems like a kind of culmination of the skills that she's developed in both those forms.

So it was really exciting to read Outline and see how she'd sort of brought to bear all the skills that

and produced an entirely new form for her work.

And also I think I have a lot of sympathy for the way that she's suffered from critics.

So I think you mentioned, Kate, the derision with which two of her memoirs were received, which sort of was outsized compared to what other writers have copped when they've written about their personal lives.

You think of Nascar and many others.

She really, really was...

savaged really unfairly and so it's sort of quite satisfying to see that she's kind of moved past that what she saw as creative death after aftermath yeah she said she didn't write for for in one one review it said she claimed not to have written for three years after that was published but the review had carefully gone and researched the time between the release of the last novel and the release of outline said really it was only 18 months oh

But she called it creative death.

So as a writer, it's really thrilling to see that someone has kind of overcome that obstacle and to produce something far finer than her previous work.

They're all narrated by an invisible narrator whose name is mentioned once in each of the three novels.

Her name is Faye.

And during the course of the three novels, she travels to different locations.

In Outline, she travels to Greece.

In Transit, she's mostly in London renovating a house.

In Kudos, she's travelling to a variety of writers' festivals and events at which she is interviewed.

So what we see in the novels, and including Kudos, is a woman who, rather than tell us very much about her own life, concentrates on the stories of others, both women and men.

And through that process, by being a kind of largely invisible narrator, we're allowed to get a glimpse of these kind of quite epic stories of women