Outline
The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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Kate Lock
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By:
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Rachel Cusk
About this listen
A luminous, powerful novel that establishes Rachel Cusk as one of the finest writers in the English language.
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives.
Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.
Outline takes a hard look at the things that are hardest to speak about. It brilliantly captures conversations, investigates people’s motivations for storytelling, and questions their ability to ever do so honestly or unselfishly. In doing so it bares the deepest impulses behind the craft of fiction writing. This is Rachel Cusk’s finest work yet and one of the most startling, brilliant, original novels of recent years.
©2014 by Rachel Cusk (P)2014 by W. F. Howes, Ltd.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Set across Istanbul and Oxford, from the 1980s to the present day, Three Daughters of Eve is a sweeping tale of faith and friendship, tradition and modernity, love and an unexpected betrayal. Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife and mother, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor.
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Review 3 daughters of Eve
- By CA on 04-28-18
By: Elif Shafak
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Beautiful Animals
- A Novel
- By: Lawrence Osborne
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On a hike during a white-hot summer break on the Greek island of Hydra, Naomi and Samantha make a startling discovery: a man named Faoud, sleeping heavily, exposed to the elements, but still alive. As the two women learn more about the man, a migrant from Syria and a casualty of the crisis raging across the Aegean Sea, their own burgeoning friendship intensifies. But when their seemingly simple plan to help Faoud unravels, all must face the horrific consequences they have set in motion.
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please offer more of this author's books
- By S. Liskey on 07-20-17
By: Lawrence Osborne
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The Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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Late in the Day
- A Novel
- By: Tessa Hadley
- Narrated by: Abigail Thaw
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their 20s. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: She is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. The loss warps their relationships.
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It's all in the performance
- By RueRue on 02-08-19
By: Tessa Hadley
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Putney
- A Novel
- By: Sofka Zinovieff
- Narrated by: Michelle Ford
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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The Island
- By: Victoria Hislop
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding plans a trip to her mother's childhood home in Plaka, Greece hoping to unravel Sofia's hidden past. Given a letter to take to Sofia's old friend, Fotini, Alexis is promised that through Fotini, she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the deserted island of Spinalonga—Greece's former leper colony. Fotini reveals the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war, and passion.
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Will listen to it again someday
- By RN on 01-07-23
By: Victoria Hislop
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The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
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Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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Galilee
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 23 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The Barbarossa family’s roots are far more ancient and ethereal, but they are bound to the Gearys by a shared history of murder, insanity, and adultery. When Rachel Geary and Galilee, the seductive prince of the Barbarossa clan, fall in love, they unleash powerful enmities that could destroy both dynasties. Shorter and more conventional than some of Barker’s other work, this novel is especially rich with complex, passionate, three-dimensional characters, lush settings, and elegant language.
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An Audiophile's Dream
- By Joseph on 09-01-11
By: Clive Barker
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The Magus
- By: John Fowles
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 26 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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John Fowles’s The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, and it continues to create tension and concern today.
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One of the best novels that I really think I hate.
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
By: John Fowles
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This review is biased
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Appreciated it, but didn't like it
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A novel worth reading
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This review is biased
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
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A Rollercoaster That Never Descends
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Absolute
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The Savage Detectives
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The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Everything is baroque-en
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Second Place
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A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma - and disrupts the calm of her secluded household. Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives.
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Description of child sex abuse
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Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
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2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
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Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
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The story of a young British woman's first affair and entry into adulthood.
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most boring book I've ever read.
- By Lee C. Bendig on 05-28-15
By: Rachel Cusk
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The Corrections
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Aftermath
- On Marriage and Separation
- By: Rachel Cusk
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In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk’s marriage of 10 years came to an end. Candid and revelatory, Aftermath chronicles the perilous journey as the author redefines herself and creates a new version of family life for her daughters. She discovers previously unknown strengths and freedoms, but also finds herself suddenly vulnerable to outsiders, unwelcome advice, social displacement, and the absence of a clear authority. The pressure to reconstruct a “normal” life for her daughters competes with the sense that nothing feels normal at all.
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Good book great author
- By S. spronsen on 08-28-24
By: Rachel Cusk
What listeners say about Outline
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous
- 09-02-24
Might it be better in print?
I bought this Audible book because the author is highly considered, and my daughter is reading one of her books.
The narrator reads with lots of inflection and supposed meaning, and yet, somehow, the effect is of cool distance.
It took me a while to figure out that the book was going nowhere, that we were entreated to find, if not meaning, at least some interest in so many conversations.
I stuck it through to the end.
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- Nick O.
- 07-18-23
Difficult and Better in Print
This is a tricky little novel. The narrator is extremely passive -- "I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible" -- listening while others relate their stories and observations, and so there's a languid, discursive quality to the book. I found my mind wandering while I listened, as you might when sitting on a ferry, overhearing other passengers, tuning in and out of conversations. Sometimes a beautiful phrase or fascinating insight would catch my attention, and I'd find myself turning back to the text so I could reflect on the passage: "It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious." That kind of language is harder to catch on audio, and so I'd stop for a while and pick it back up when I had time to devote great attention, and even then I rarely felt motivated to dive back in. I also didn't care much for the reader, Kate Lock, who tries too hard with Greek accents, or overdramatizes a woman talking while she eats honey from a jar: Lock makes a constant smacking sound with her lips, sounding like Winnie the Pooh.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Thomas
- 04-06-24
The tone of the narrator is perfect
This book is a beautifully constructed set of dialogues (really monologues) delving into questions of identity and consciousness as exhibited in male and female relationships. I thought the narrator did an excellent job of capturing the nuances of each character’s conversations.
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- Devoted Online Shopper
- 03-15-23
Excruciating
This was a great disappointment. The writing is skilled. The narration is irritating and borderline intolerable. The characters are narcissistic selfish petty whiners whom I hoped would all meet a tragic end, hoisted on their own miserable complaints a la O Henry. But no, they just kept whining away. If it weren’t for my commitment to my book group to read the book I would have put it down well before halfway.
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- T. Samuel
- 05-29-24
Am I missing it?
Am I missing it? I kept waiting for something to develop. Just conversations but no deep story line.
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- JR from Dallas
- 08-04-22
Not even an editor could help this one . . .
There were 2-3 small snippets that were interesting. Characters were boring, unlikeable or indistinguishable. Greece as the setting took no real part in the book. It was like an uninteresting acquaintance droning on and on.
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- Zeno
- 11-17-22
Barely an outline
I read a piece by a huge fan of Rachel Cusk - had never heard of her so I wanted to give it a go. It didn't even leave me wondering. According to the Amazon snippet this novel was a finalist for the Folio Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was, apparently, one of The New York Times' Top Ten Books of the Year. Named a A New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vogue, NPR, The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, and The Globe and Mail ... the list goes on. Really?
This feels like a writing exercise the writer in the story gives her students. Yes, it is well written - but what's the point other than any number of disconnected and barely interesting musings about the lives and experiences and idiosyncrasies of people you will even remotely begin to care about? According to one snippet, the "novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form." Oh, please, that sounds as pretentious as the novel was flat.
Maybe I'm just not seeing it - someone help me, please - enlighten me. It's happened before. I initially hated Annie Proulx' The Shipping News. When reading it again years later, I absolutely loved it. Still, for the life of me, I cannot see anything that I might have missed here. Again, enlighten me.
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- niia
- 11-01-22
Depressing and grim.
While it’s clear Cusk is a skilled writer, this book is a very depressing collection of encounters the main character has during the course of a week as she teaches a writing class in Athens. As the characters were brought to life, each one was worse than the next. Self-involved, almost heartless people who complain constantly about what it takes to raise children, along with some awful accounts of animal cruelty that honestly made me cringe because of the callousness. I basically hated every one of these navel-gazers and wished they would all go away. It’s all very pompous and the reader is very pompous and annoying, as well, making it even worse. I was close to finishing it because she is a good writer, but after many hours listening to them all complain about their lives, I couldn’t even finish the book.
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- BDP
- 01-19-23
The book is excellent - narration not so much
I loved the writing of this novel - so beautiful and interesting. The narration of the British characters' dialogue is great, but the voices of the Greek characters are horrendous. I can barely get myself to listen to the last 27 minutes that I have left. Admittedly, a Greek accent is very difficult and subtle, but it would have been so much better if someone Greek were reading the dialogue.
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