Arlington Park
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize
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- € 9,99
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** Order Life of M, the new novel from Rachel Cusk, now **
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
'Funny, poignant, savage, tender and appalling.'
Helen Dunmore
'One of the most intelligent current interpreters of domestic life.'
Catherine Taylor, Independent on Sunday
'Tender, haunting, grimly comic and infinitely disturbing.'
Evening Standard
Arlington Park is an ordinary English suburb. Over the course of a single day, the novel moves from one household to another, revealing its characters: Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; Solly, about to give birth to her fourth child; Maisie, struggling to accept provincial life; and Christine, the optimist and host of a dinner party where the neighbours come together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this devastating ensemble novel, Whitbread Award winner Cusk (Saving Agnes) exposes the roiling inner lives and not-so-quiet desperation of young mothers in the well-to-do London suburb Arlington Park. The book's single day begins with an epic rainstorm that wakes part-time private-school English teacher Juliet Randall, who spent the previous evening at a wealthier neighbor's home and was told, in front of husband Benedict, "You want to be careful.... You can start to sound strident at your age." As Amanda Clapp strains to maintain her house's empty perfection, a multi-kid play date gets out of control. Maisie Carrington feels "imprisoned for life" by her frosty, upper-crust childhood, and can barely contain her violent feelings toward her own daughters. Christine Lanham, a newcomer to the class distinction her marriage has brought her, abhors the hypocrisy that surrounds her, but knows she will never leave her family. The story line coils around each woman's home until it gathers the group for a drunken dinner party, where husbands express pleasure with their privilege while fretting that something feels amiss, and children, exhausted by their mothers' alternating neglect and desperate love, sleep like the dead leaving the women holding hot coals of their silent insights. Their plight is an old story, but Cusk makes it incisively vivid.
