The new book by Rachel Cusk, winner of numerous literary awards, completes the canon-breaking trilogy begun with the novels Contour and Transit. Cusk explores the nature of family and art, justice, love and suffering. Her heroine Fay arrives in a rapidly changing Europe, where questions of personal and political identity are being hotly debated. Faced with the rituals of the literary world, she discovers that among the differing ideas about the public behavior of a creative personality, there is no place left for the story of a real person. In the people Fay interacts with, she sees a tension between truth and public image—a fissure that centers enormous dramatic power as Kudos builds to a beautiful and profound climax.