Rachel Cusk is a master of literary fiction. She is known for grappling in her works with modern motherhood, morality, the self and bodies, gender roles, love and cruelty. Parade is no different. The topics Cusk writes about here – who gets to be an artist; how experience of art differs both between artists and the spectators alike; can one be both a mother and an artist, at what cost? – are not new, but it’s the form and the language that is always fresh and ambitious with Cusk. 

Countless artists, each simply called G, move across their lives and creations, fully complex and formed in such a precise, strict manner. Parade is episodic, but rounded, with interloping first and third person points of narration. Cusk’s prose is ablaze with wit and deconstruction of safe concepts, plain yet exciting precisely because of the way it explores them.

Worth the time it might take to settle in, as the rewards will follow; there is simply nothing like the fluidity of Rachel Cusk’s language and the endless capacity of her thinking.