The Bradshaw Variations A Novel [Paperback]

Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and nourishment in his daily piano study. But his parents and in-laws wonder why he has swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife. And how can this be good for their daughter?

Tonie is increasingly seduced away from domestic life by the headier world of work, where long-forgotten memories of ambition are awakened. She finds herself outside their tight family circle, alive to previously unimaginable possibilities.

Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow their fortunes, andThe Bradshaw Variationsshows Rachel Cusk to be a lyrically subversive writer at the height of her powers.

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 Variationsis 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 . . . [Cusk] has a task and she applies herself to it soberly: the trapping, if only in a mirrored surface, of some fragment of reality that might yield a truth about the whole. Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

Frighteningly sharp . . . [I was] affected and moved, [and] at times I just wanted l#