The Bradshaw Variations - by Rachel Cusk (Paperback)

About the Book

"As stay-at-home dad Thomas Bradshaw grows more comfortable with taking care of his eight-year-old daughter and learning how to play the piano, his wife becomes more and more at ease in the professional world, all while their parents look on in disapproval"--

Book Synopsis

"Astonishing . . . The Bradshaw Variations is a timely, necessary story." --Elle

Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy-enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad.

While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.

The seventh novel by the acclaimed author of the Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations is a lyrical, subversive tale of a marriage unraveling.

Review Quotes

"Astonishing . . . Like a genius gem cutter, Cusk continues to brazenly flout the pure realism that dominates current literary fiction in favor of a Woolfean approach that uses style and sensory impressionism to chisel out inner turmoil. The Bradshaw Variations is a timely, necessary story . . . I'm escaping to the metaphorical forest with a pile of Cusk novels. I hope you'll be brave enough to join me." --Miranda Purves, Elle

"Again and again [Cusk] provides that primal joy of literature: the sense of things being seen afresh." --James Lasdun, The Guardian

"A virtuoso . . . [Cusk's] interiors whisper and shiver, as if Virginia Woolf had flitted through . . . It is the author's mix of scorn and compassion that is so bracing. Sometimes she complicates simple things, snarling them in a cat's cradle of abstraction, but just as often, a sentence rewards with its absolute and unexpected precision . . ." --Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

"Frighteningly sharp . . . [I was] affected and moved, [and] at times I just wanted to punch the air in a frenzy of delighted recognition . . . Every single one of these honestly drawn and heartsinkingly recognizable characters . . . gave me real, crackling pleasure . . . This isn't the first novel of Cusk's to make me laugh out loud, but it is the first to have really moved me . . . Her triumph is to make us laugh at, but also I think forgive, ourselves." --Julie Myerson, Financial Times

"Brilliant . . . Cusk is marvellous on the way that one generation watches another and it is her own watchfulness that makes her novel so special. She combines restlessness with absolute stillness; she misses nothing . . . In a sense, [this book] is a modern Mrs. Dalloway . . . I enjoyed everything about this dazzling performance of a book. I was engrossed, entertained and converted . . . This, Rachel Cusk's seventh novel, is her best." --Kate Kellaway, The Observer (London)

"Cusk, who won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize for her debut novel, 'Saving Agnes, ' is a first-rate writer, caustically intelligent and sharply observant. . . Pretty much every page [of The Bradshaw Variations] gleams with Cusk's darkly humorous powers of observation." --Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review

"Cusk is mercilessly acute in her dissection of the Bradshaw family. Their failures are exposed by her scalpel prose. It makes the reader feel rather protective of them, which is a clever trick. It allows Cusk's characters human breath beyond the high art of her writing . . . I know I will keep thinking about them." --Helen Brown, The Daily Telegraph

"Cusk has a gift for wrapping minute, piercing observations on domestic life in lyrical passages that consistently bring fresh insight to the time-worn question." --The A.V. Club

"Like Franzen's The Corrections, Cusk's narrative captures the emotional life of its characters, complete with downfalls and compromises. While the chapters move swiftly, Cusk takes time to pause over and unravel intimate moments and uncover the illogical paths of human relationships." --Heather Paulson, Booklist

About the Author

Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place; the trilogy Outline, Transit, Kudos; the essay collection Coventry; the memoirs A Life's Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath; and several other novels: Saving Agnes (winner of the Whitbread Award), The Temporary, The Country Life (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Lucky Ones, In the Fold, Arlington Park and The Bradshaw Variations.