Advance Praise
“Parade pulls off a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat . . . It pursues and deepens [Cusk's] lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent . . . While Cusk’s painter concentrates on painting the world upside down, Cusk keeps turning it inside out.”
—Kate Kellaway, The Observer
"Cusk’s genius is that, even unmoored from plot, she holds attention, still keeps fingers (and imaginations) always turning that next page . . . Less a story than a meditation on seeing and what is seen, Cusk’s new novel is a work of quiet intensity with an oddly Zen quality to it; it is a book that makes demands, foremost that readers stop looking and finally see."
—Herman Sutter, Library Journal
“A stimulating experimental novel . . . [Cusk’s] spare approach to character is as sharp as ever. Once again, Cusk offers ranging and resonant perspectives on art, love, and femininity.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Readers of Cusk’s previous fiction will recognize the masterful way she locates specific personal histories within a relatively abstract narrative framework (minimal details of place, time, and chronology) to unsettle the reader’s expectations about what fiction can or should do . . . Cusk’s prose is diamond-sharp, as are her insights. Short and intense, crammed with desperately human characters and much food for thought.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ 05/24/2024
An artist known only as G begins to paint upside-down pictures; his wife is especially troubled by an upside-down nude of her. An unnamed female refugee is attacked by a homeless woman who pauses and turns for one last look (like an artist looking at a piece of art). And there is another G—a woman sculptor… Yet there is little demarcation betwixt and between them all. Cusk (Second Place) gives a kind of Kafkaesque quality to the confusion in her latest novel, leaving readers with little more than possibilities and questions, ponderabilities, one might say—until, in the end, those very qualities become not the meaning of the book but its purpose, and in some sense, its inexpressible wisdom. With skill and a disturbing sense of menace, the strands of the seemingly plotless story seem to unravel before readers' eyes. Cusk's genius is that, even unmoored from plot, she holds attention, still keeps fingers (and imaginations) always turning that next page. VERDICT Less a story than a meditation on seeing and what is seen, Cusk's new novel is a work of quiet intensity with an oddly Zen quality to it; it is a book that makes demands, foremost that readers stop looking and finally see.—Herman Sutter