Parade

Summary: Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. The attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. When a woman dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom. An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they have inherited different things. Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character and plot to tell a true story--about art, family, morality, gender and how we compose ourselves. A writer and a visionary like no other, Rachel Cusk turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is. --