Rachel Cusk

A woman writer goes to Athens to teach a writing course. There, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. The more they talk the more certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Agnes Day is a twenty-something sub-editor and failure extraordinaire, with a close circle of friends and a habit of falling for the wrong man. When the twin strains of a first job and a doomed love affair provoke a spiritual crisis, Agnes sets out to save herself and all those around her.

In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. As she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children, she is made to confront aspects of living she has, until now, avoided, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to and believe in life.