SECOND PLACE

A dispirited woman persuades a famous male artist to visit her coastal home, seeking to understand herself through the prism of his gaze. Cusk, a virtuoso of our interior lives and the author of the renowned Outline Trilogy, here spins a captivating, compulsively readable talepart confession, part allegorythat unflinchingly peers into the crevices of relationships. I dont think I realized how many parts of life there were, her narrator observes, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness.