The lucky ones

The much-praised new novel from award-winning author Rachel Cusk, who was one of Granta's Best of British writers. In this profound study of human relationships, five overlapping narratives of love and detachment merge to form a powerful evocation of family identity. A young pregnant woman's misfortune; a new father's disaffection; a daughter's search for lost childhood; a mother's antagonism; a wife's secret suffering - through it all runs the story of Victor Porter, a campaigning lawyer, and his journalist wife Serena, in whose relationship the conflict between the public and the personal, between love and morality, is played out. Rachel Cusk writes of life's transformations; of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life. It illuminates with startling precision the texture and complexity of emotional existence within 'the bustling concourses of life.'