The very form of her work, while consistently inventive within its traditional frame, trades on a kind of nostalgia, and that nostalgia often correlates with the novels’ content it seems no coincidence that Cusk’s recent “ Kudos” is set explicitly in the Europe of the Brexit era-fearful, ugly, divided-while Atkinson’s books often hark back to the days of the Second World War and the Blitz, when plucky England came together as one, and triumphed in a European conflict that ended six years before Atkinson was born. In the twenty-odd years since her prize-winning début, “ Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” Atkinson has predicated her enormously successful career upon giving readers intelligent and artful iterations of what they already know they like: made-up Johns and Janes, in realistically described settings, enacting a plot that’s not only ingeniously constructed but, in the end, fully resolved.
One could do worse, then, than to think of Kate Atkinson as a sort of anti-Cusk. I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. . . . Phone orders min p&p of £1.Any new British novel at this particular moment must emerge, it seems, in the shadow of Rachel Cusk, whose just completed trilogy of austerely philosophical autofiction reflects her repudiation of the novel’s traditional building blocks-character, plot, description, etc.-as “fake and embarrassing,” as she told an interviewer. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. To order The Pact We Made, Transcription or Hiking With Nietzsche go to or call 03. A thoughtful mix of biography and memoir, it confronts the predictability of adult life head-on. Actually, he argues now, Nietzschean ideas are better suited to the conundrums of middle age, and Kaag reassesses them while pondering his own life journey. When American philosopher John Kaag was 19, he nearly killed himself in the Swiss Alps in an attempt to ape Nietzsche and imagine himself above the “self- imposed constraints that quietly govern modern life”. It results in a wry, enjoyable thriller, with its warning that the lies we tell about ourselves have consequences. We first meet her in the 1980s – looking back at her past deceptions, it becomes clear she is not entirely sure what to make of her own identity. Juliet Armstrong is a wartime MI5 agent who goes undercover to entrap Nazi sympathisers in Britain. With its depictions of trilby-wearing fake Gestapo agents and ice-cool femmes fatales, Atkinson’s spy novel seems to both salute and mock the genre.
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