Product Description

Stella Benson leaves her husband, her home, and her life in London to go to the village of Hilltop in Sussex. There she will be au pair to Martin Madden. Stella finds that she is unsuited to country life and what's more is intimidated by the Maddens. Is disaster staring her in the face?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148418 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From the Publisher
Rich and subtle novel about families, love and being alone
Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them - as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably low. What could possibly have driven her to leave her home, job and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all contact with her parents? Why is she so reluctant to talk about her past? "Like the novels of Evelyn Waugh or Stella Gibbons, The Country Life has a moral core, meticulously disguised by comedy. Cusk is a highly interesting, original writer and more unusually she is a joy to read" Helen Dunmore, The Times; "In this, her third novel, Rachel Cusk writes with the fastidiousness and delightful grace we have come to expect...Stella is a splendidly memorable creation" Sue Gaisford, Independent on Sunday; "This book is a delight...The Country Life is remarkable for two things; its humour and its menace...Its mixture of P.G.Wodehouse, Cold Comfort Farm and Jane Austen is a pleasure to read" Tibor Fischer, Sunday Express

Customer Reviews

Sussex Life
Stella Benson leaves London in mysterious circumstances to take up a post in the Sussex countryside as au pair to a disabled teenager.
She arrives in the middle of a heatwave and indeed, over the next week makes extraordinarily heavy weather of everything she undertakes, from entering the village shop to getting dressed. Her every inept action leads to disaster; she cannot, it seems, wash up without causing a flood, walk across a carpet without leaving a trail, or pick up a bottle without it leaping from her hand.
Stock comic characters abound, from shrill upper-class women to taciturn inbred farm labourers and strange “creatures” with healing powers. Huge themes lurk in the woodshed, including incest, madness and infidelity. These are picked up, dallied with, then casually put down again.
Cusk’s prose style is something of a jungle, too – dense and overwritten.
Despite all this, the novel is funny, acute and compelling, drawing us into Stella’s buccolic misadventures and, the real subject of the book, her search for motivation and identity, but leaving us, ultimately, none the wiser.

When "Cold Comfort" has a heat wave
Rachel Cusk has a talent for the awkward. Her heroine, although somewhat unreliable as a narrator, is completely frank about the humiliations that make up the fabric of her life. Both the setting and characters are brilliantly drawn, and very funny, to boot. My one minor criticism of this book is that the ending seems a bit tentative. Saving something for the sequel?

An hysterical account of a woman's countryside tribulations
I didn't think that I would enjoy this book at all. The storyline didn't strike me as having much to offer, but I had enjoyed both of Rachel Cusk's previous novels so gave it a go. It took me a couple of chapters to get into it but from that point on I was addicted. The detail is breathtaking and Cusk's descriptions of a heatwave in the countryside almost had me dripping sweat and scratching the nettle stings. It is also hysterically funny, not in a jokey way, but in a rather sad way, as every attempt by Stella to get to grips with life in the countryside is racked with disaster and misfortune and quite often slapstick physical misadventure. She is a stunningly orginal fall girl and quite frankly I would have enjoyed reading about her clumsy expedition through life for another 400 pages. Read this book.