A young pregnant mother wrestles with an utterly changed life; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can't fully understand. A rare novel that illuminates "the bustling concourses of life" without sacrificing emotional depth and complexity, The Lucky Ones confirms Rachel Cusk's place among our most incisive writers.

Rachel Cusk is the author of nine novels, three non-fiction works, a play, and numerous shorter essays and memoirs. Her first novel, Saving Agnes, was published in 1993. Her most recent novel, Kudos, the final part of the Outline trilogy, will be published in the US and the UK in May 2018.
Saving Agnes won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Country Life won the Somerset Maugham Award and subsequent books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Whitbread Prize, Goldsmiths Prize, Bailey’s Prize, and the Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award in Canada. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. Her version of Euripides’ Medea was directed by Rupert Goold and was shortlisted for the Susan Blackburn Smith Award.
Rachel was born in Canada in 1967 and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles before moving to the UK in 1974. She studied English at Oxford and published her first novel Saving Agnes when she was twenty six, and its themes of femininity and social satire remained central to her work over the next decade. In responding to the formal problems of the novel representing female experience she began to work additionally in non-fiction. Her autobiographical accounts of motherhood and divorce (A Life’s Work and Aftermath) were groundbreaking and controversial. 
Most recently, after a long period of consideration, she attempted to evolve a new form, one that could represent personal experience while avoiding the politics of subjectivity and literalism and remaining free from narrative convention. That project became a trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos). Outline was one of The New York Times’ top 5 novels in 2015. Judith Thurman’s 2017 profile of Rachel in The New Yorker comments “Many experimental writers have rejected the mechanics of storytelling, but Cusk has found a way to do so without sacrificing its tension. Where the action meanders, language takes up the slack. Her sentences hum with intelligence, like a neural pathway.”

Rachel Cusk's profile page

“Cusk has a gift for articulating fluid, unsettling emotions just beneath the surface of consciousness.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Witty, trenchant and…startling.” — Library Journal

“Insightful…perceptively drawn…poignant, evocative and meant to be savored.” — Booklist

“Gorgeous, languorous writing.” — Publishers Weekly

“Impressively written.” — Marie Claire (UK)

“If great fiction puts into words something about ourselves that we didn’t know we knew, this is it.” — Daily Mail (London)

“Sharp observation of character, vivid imagistic descriptions.” — Independent on Sunday

“You want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch.” — Independent Magazine

“A lovely book.” — Irish Independent

“[Cusk’s] intelligence and emotional honesty give a sense of having experienced, rather than read, this book…extraordinary.” — People

“Witty and topical…a fresh and compassionate portrait.” — The New Yorker

“Subtle and satisfying...a brilliant collection.” — Boston Globe