Outline

"If there’s a writer who marries thinking and writing with more muscularity than Rachel Cusk — well, introduce me. Outline is the oddest of books, in which a writer travels to Athens to run a writing workshop. On the journey she engages in conversations, listening, sometimes without comment. That’s all it is — a series of chats, of observations — but it suddenly becomes so intensely observed that you realize you’re not holding a novel; you’re holding a blade. No book in 2015 ruffled me more — I found myself waking in the night to spend time with its icy-hot precision, its crisp writing, and the opportunity to hold its mirror to my own mind."

"Conceptually magnificent, these books offer literature something new in thought, expression and structure. Neither kind nor cruel, Cusk's female narrator is a massive presence disguised as an absence. That is alchemy."

"Books that have counteracted that feeling for me include Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, and Sheila Heti's "Pure Colour.""