Life of M
From the author of the Outline trilogy
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 25 Aug 2026
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- 18,99 €
Publisher Description
** AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW **
From the critically-acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty and truth -- and a blazing renovation of the form
A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She's a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.
M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away.
Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography. Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths - about the very experience of living - might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? And what in the end will M make of their work?
In Life of M, Rachel Cusk has again fashioned a new kind of literature. A novel stripped of artifice, it takes our emptiness and fills it with grace.
'It is truly masterful, her best work so far. I loved it' Vincenzo Latronico
'[Cusk] is a disciple of the truth, and she helps us to see' Lucy Jones, Independent
'Roll up, wave a flag and join the crowds to watch Rachel Cusk continue her relentless march through life' Irish Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer befriends a movie star named M and proceeds to write an imagined version of M's life story in this fascinating and complex work of metafiction from Cusk (Parade). The middle-aged writer, ungendered and unnamed, is struck near the beginning of the novel when M says "that starring in a film as a child had immediately brought her childhood to an end." The writer is reminded of comments by the author of a popular memoir—details evoke Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno—"who was saying the same things about the deeds of her stepfather." What follows is a mix of ambiguous first-person plural vignettes depicting routine life in the writer and M's unnamed cosmopolitan city and close third-person chapters focused on M reflecting on her work and persona. As an actor and fashion brand ambassador, M's "work is to be herself," but the essence of that self remains mysterious. ("My secret is that I have no secret," she tells an acting class, revealing more than she intends or realizes.) As the writer's manuscript reaches completion, the writer reappears on the page, and both the writer and M offer fascinating insights about the fraught autobiography project and M's fear of losing control of her presentation. This is spectacular.
