Second Place

Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life . . . She moves through it as a blasted centre full only of instinct and superhuman hearing and hackles.

Rachel Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force . . .

Bewildering and bewitching.

A stranger comes to stay in this fascinating, uncomfortable exploration of creativity, the male gaze and the gendered experience of freedom. Cusk’s story of a female writer’s power struggle with a male artist is one of the first novels to take inspiration from lockdown.

Ever inventive, Cusk keeps pushing the novel into new terrain.

Cusk is really interested in ideas — how to live, what freedom means, the ways women subsume themselves into the lives of others … The hybrid form that results — half-novel, half-not — has a timeless, enduring quality.