Second Place

Listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction, Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk was longlisted for the Booker Prize. On a sun-soaked Parisian street, M, a mother on the brink of rebellion, wanders into a famous artist’s gallery show. The artist’s paintings speak—quite literally—to her, promising a liberation usually reserved for men. She returns to the coastal home she shares with her husband, but the unsettling impression of the art, and the evasive artist, remains. So, she writes to him, inviting him to stay in their second place, a modest cottage salvaged from the land. When historical catastrophe upends daily life, M’s daughter returns to the marsh, along with her prim, privileged boyfriend. The painter arrives too, accompanied by a lithe, cosmopolitan lover. As the couples become resigned to the perilous indoors, fissures form within the strange group. The painter’s quietly demonic presence wreaks havoc with M, plunging her into existential disarray. As secrets, alliances and private desires come to light, she is forced to choose between her deepest impulses: to comply or to rebel completely.  “Cusk, a virtuoso of our interior lives and the author of the renowned  Outline Trilogy , here spins a captivating, compulsively readable tale―part confession, part allegory―that unflinchingly peers into the crevices of relationships.”  ― O, the Oprah Magazine Rachel Cusk is the author of Outline, Transit , and Kudos ; the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper , and Aftermath ; and several other novels, including Saving Agnes , winner of the Whitbread Award; The Country Life , which won the Somerset Maugham Award; Arlington Park ; and The Bradshaw Variations . She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.  Buy Now from Amazon Buy Now from Bookshop Find other novels by Rachel Cusk on Art In Fiction.