Product Description

Juliet is enraged at the victory of men over women in family life. Amanda is warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework. Solly is confronting her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger. Maisie despairs at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed. And Christine's troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, she writes about the domestic lives, private thoughts and fears of a group of remarkable and instantly recognisable women.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9869 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"'A strikingly good novel.' Helen Doomora"

Suburban motherhood is no picnic in this latest examination of intertwined lives from British novelist Cusk (The Lucky Ones, 2004, etc.).The action takes place during a single rainy day in a well-pruned English suburb. But though its streets are tree-lined, its shops exclusive, its houses ranging from pretty to grand, Arlington Park is not entirely sheltered from the problems of the world. While dropping their older children at school and toting their toddlers around on errands, the no-longer-so-young mothers worry about impoverished gypsies, people dying of malnutrition, earthquake victims in Indonesia, ecological destruction and the four-year-old girl abducted from their own prosperous enclave. (She's found dead toward the end, a denouement in keeping with the novel's generally dark tone.) Is there something they should do about these unpleasant realities? How can they help anyone else, when they feel so helplessly adrift themselves? In previous fiction, and in her poignant memoir A Life's Work (2001), Cusk sensitively balanced an honest depiction of parenting's often overwhelming demands with tender acknowledgment of its joys. In this book, children are nearly always a burden, husbands prompt little besides bitterness and the one protagonist who's still working finds her job as a schoolteacher mostly a reminder of the intellectual ambitions she failed to fulfill. As usual with this deft and astute writer, the prose is elegant, the characterizations spot-on. Frustrated Juliet, obsessive Amanda, conflicted city transplant Maisie, pregnant-yet-again Solly and in particular angrily exuberant, confrontational Christine are wholly believable and uncomfortably familiar. Such is the author's skill that few readers will be able to escape a sense of squirming empathy for these women's frequent bouts of self-pity and vertiginous feeling of not being in control of their relatively privileged lives. The sour aftertaste their stories leave, however, is a new development in Cusk's work-and not a welcome one.Accomplished, honest and uncompromising, but not a whole lot of fun. (Kirkus Reviews)

Sunday Times
'funny and exhilaratingly unrepentant ... deliriously enjoyable'

Observer
'a novel about compromises and, in particular, the ones women make
when they become mothers ... an uncomfortable but essential book'

Customer Reviews

Awful !
I absolutely hated this boring depressing book. There is no point in regretting things. Whatever it is - it's over and done with and dont do it again, but, if I were to regret something - buying this book would be one of them. What a waste of money. I also read, having bought it at the same time one of this author's other books. I hated that one too. I guess I just dont like her style and frankly I believe a lot of these people who say she is a wonderful writer dont mean a word of it.

Boring !
There is no storyline. This book is only about the depressing lives of average housewifes in an average English suburb. Boring.

Speaks of nothing new
Cusk develops the characters well, but if it's a good plot you are looking for, then this book may well be one to avoid. Arlington Park puts forward an interesting, and in my opinion feminist, view of motherhood and the 'woman's lot' but really talks of nothing new and hasn't overly inspired me to read any other books by this author.