Reading List

Authors Like Rachel Cusk

Cusk wrote three memoirs in eleven years and was punished for all of them. A Life's Work (2001), on motherhood, and Aftermath (2012), on the end of her marriage, drew a level of personal hostility that she has described as creative death; one subject of The Last Supper (2009) sued her. Her response was to build a novel with the confessing self removed. In Outline (2014) a writer named Faye travels to Athens to teach and says almost nothing while other people tell her their lives at length and expose themselves in the telling; her name is withheld for most of the book. Transit and Kudos completed the trilogy. Second Place (2021) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and took the Prix Femina étrangère, and Parade (Faber, June 2024, 208 pages) won the Goldsmiths Prize with four sections about artists all called G. Her new novel, Life of M, published by Faber this autumn, is narrated by a would-be ghostwriter attempting the autobiography of a film star, and has been read as a thinly veiled portrait of Natalie Portman. Her position, given to The Guardian in 2014, is that autobiography is increasingly the only form left in any of the arts. The ten below are chosen on that argument.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Autofiction and form · Goldsmiths Prize 2024 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Rachel Cusk, the closest match is Deborah Levy, who took the same route out of memoir and into something stranger. Annie Ernaux is the French original of the impersonal first person and won the Nobel Prize for it. Katie Kitamura is the nearest American, Jenny Offill and Sheila Heti the sharpest on fragment and self. Nathalie Sarraute and Elizabeth Hardwick got there decades earlier. And Zadie Smith is the argument against: she has made the case for everything Cusk threw away.

Every book by Rachel Cusk →

10 authors like Rachel Cusk

01
The same escape from memoir · Closest match

Deborah Levy

British · Things I Don't Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018), Real Estate (2021)

Levy was born in Johannesburg in 1959; her father was imprisoned for his membership of the African National Congress and the family later moved to England. After two Booker-shortlisted novels she wrote the three short volumes she calls a living autobiography, taking a marriage ending, a mother dying, a shed to write in and a bicycle bought at fifty, and thinking through them out loud. She has kept publishing fiction alongside, most recently August Blue (2023).

The closest living match, and the two writers are constantly named together for good reason. Both left conventional memoir after finding what it costs, both replaced it with something that keeps the self on the page while refusing to confess, and both are ruthless about length. Levy allows herself jokes and figurative writing that Cusk has largely renounced, which makes her the friendlier way in. Read The Cost of Living.

— Lisanne
Every book by Deborah Levy →
02
The French original

Annie Ernaux

French · A Man's Place (1984), Simple Passion (1991), The Years (2008)

Ernaux writes in what she calls flat writing: no metaphor, no invented dialogue, prices and brand names left in, the first person used as evidence rather than as confession. La Place won the Prix Renaudot; Les Années tells fifty years of French life in the third person and was shortlisted for the International Booker. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.

The writer who solved Cusk's problem first, from a completely different direction. Both arrived at a first person stripped of self-justification — Ernaux by treating her own life as a specimen, Cusk by making her narrator a surface other people talk at. Ernaux is the more political and the more compressed; Cusk is the more socially observant. Read A Man's Place and then Outline, and the two solutions sit side by side.

— Lisanne

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Authors like Annie Ernaux →

03
The nearest American

Katie Kitamura

American · A Separation (2017), Intimacies (2021), Audition (2025)

A Separation follows a woman to Greece to look for the husband she has already left but not told anyone about. Intimacies is narrated by an interpreter at the international court in The Hague who spends her working life speaking other people's words, including a former president's, and finds her own life becoming similarly unanchored. Audition (2025) turns on an actor and a young man who may or may not be her son.

The closest contemporary in method: a controlled, watchful narrator who withholds, in prose so level that the reader keeps looking for the trapdoor. Kitamura shares Cusk's interest in people whose job is to be a medium for other people — interpreters, actors, ghostwriters — which makes her the obvious companion to Life of M. She is more plotted and closer to suspense.

— Lisanne
04
The novel as fragments

Jenny Offill

American · Dept. of Speculation (2014), Weather (2020)

Dept. of Speculation tells a marriage, a baby and an affair in a few hundred short paragraphs, some of them a single sentence, moving between the wife's life and whatever she happens to have read about Rilke, bedbugs or Soviet space dogs. Weather does the same for a university librarian answering letters for a climate podcast and slowly losing her nerve about the future.

The same instinct that plot is not where a life is actually stored, worked out as white space rather than as monologue. Offill and Cusk both published their reinvention in 2014 and both were treated as a break with the traditional novel. Offill is much funnier and much shorter; Cusk is more sustained and more forbidding. Read Dept. of Speculation in an afternoon.

— Lisanne
05
The self, examined out loud

Sheila Heti

Canadian · How Should a Person Be? (2010), Motherhood (2018), Pure Colour (2022)

How Should a Person Be? is built partly from transcribed conversations with the author's real friends and is subtitled a novel from life. Motherhood follows a narrator deciding whether to have a child, consulting coins to answer her own questions, and the book takes its structure from that indecision. Heti has also worked as interviews editor at The Believer.

The maximally exposed version of the same experiment. Where Cusk removed the confessing self and let other people speak, Heti put the confessing self at the centre and let it be unattractive, indecisive and recorded verbatim. Both books were accused of not being novels. Reading them together is the fastest way to see what autofiction is actually arguing about, which is not honesty but form.

— Lisanne
06
Everything left in

Karl Ove Knausgård

Norwegian · My Struggle, six volumes (2009–2011), The Morning Star (2020)

Knausgård wrote roughly 3,600 pages about his own life, including several hundred on cleaning his dead father's house and a long stretch on a children's birthday party. The books sold around half a million copies in Norway, a country of five million. Relatives publicly disputed his account and threatened legal action before publication. He has since moved to fiction with the Morning Star sequence.

The other famous answer to the same dissatisfaction, arrived at simultaneously and pointed the opposite way. Both writers concluded that invented characters doing invented things had become embarrassing; Knausgård's solution was to put everything in and Cusk's was to take almost everything out. She has written admiringly about him. A hundred pages of My Struggle next to Outline is the whole argument in miniature.

— Lisanne

Every book by Karl Ove Knausgård →

07
The blur, done first

W. G. Sebald

German · The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), Austerlitz (2001)

Sebald wrote in German while living in England, in long unparagraphed sentences, mixing invented and documented lives with uncaptioned photographs so that a reader can never quite establish what is real. The Rings of Saturn is a walk along the Suffolk coast that keeps disappearing into silk-weaving, herring fishing and the Belgian Congo. He died in a car crash in 2001, at fifty-seven.

The writer critics reach for when they try to place what Cusk is doing, and the one who established that a book could dispense with plot entirely and hold a reader through voice and association. He is the more melancholy and the more historical; his subject is finally European catastrophe rather than domestic life. Read The Rings of Saturn if the walking, noticing quality of Transit is what you liked.

— Lisanne
08
Older than the genre · Character declared dead in 1956

Nathalie Sarraute

French · Tropisms (1939), The Age of Suspicion (1956), Childhood (1983)

Tropisms is a series of very short prose pieces capturing the movements underneath conversation — the flinch, the calculation, the thing that passes between two people before either speaks. The Age of Suspicion is the essay collection in which Sarraute argued that character and plot had exhausted themselves and that the reader no longer believed in either. She was a central figure of the nouveau roman and lived to ninety-nine.

The argument Cusk made to The Guardian in 2014, made in French in 1956 and with a body of work behind it. Sarraute's position — that description and character are dead or dying — is almost word for word Cusk's, which is worth knowing before treating autofiction as a recent invention. Tropisms takes an hour and will change how you read the conversations in Outline.

— Lisanne
09
Older than the genre · The plotless novel, 1979

Elizabeth Hardwick

American · Sleepless Nights (1979), Seduction and Betrayal (1974)

Sleepless Nights is narrated by a woman called Elizabeth who assembles her life out of letters, remembered lodgers, a Kentucky childhood, Billie Holiday and a great deal of noticing, with no plot and no resolution. Hardwick was a critic first, co-founded the New York Review of Books in 1963, and was married to the poet Robert Lowell, who published her private letters in his own work without permission. She died in 2007.

The book people should be naming when they call Cusk unprecedented. It is a hundred and fifty pages of exactly this — a narrator sharing the author's name, other people's lives carrying the weight, no story to speak of — published in 1979 and largely by a woman who had already had her own privacy taken from her by a more famous writer. Read Sleepless Nights.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against her

Zadie Smith

British · White Teeth (2000), NW (2012), The Fraud (2023)

Smith published White Teeth at twenty-four and has written five further novels, several essay collections and a stage play. In a 2008 essay for the New York Review of Books she set out two available paths for the novel — the well-made lyrical realism she was herself accused of, and a more experimental line represented by Tom McCarthy's Remainder — and treated the choice as genuinely open rather than settled. The Fraud is a full Victorian historical novel with plot, character and a court case.

The case for everything Cusk discarded, made by someone who has read the same arguments and reached a different conclusion. Cusk says description and character are dead; Smith keeps writing crowded books full of people with names, jobs and jokes, and they are not naive. The disagreement is the most interesting one in contemporary British fiction. Read NW, which experiments hard and still refuses to give up on character, and decide who is right.

— Lisanne

Every book by Zadie Smith →

Authors like Zadie Smith →

Where to start if you loved Rachel Cusk

If you want the closest match, read Deborah Levy.

The Cost of Living. The same escape from memoir, with jokes left in.

If you want the French original, read Annie Ernaux.

A Man's Place. Ninety pages, no metaphor, a Nobel Prize.

If you loved Life of M, read Katie Kitamura.

Intimacies. An interpreter who speaks other people's words for a living.

If you want the ancestor nobody names, read Elizabeth Hardwick.

Sleepless Nights. The same book, in 1979, by a woman who had been written about.

If you want the argument against her, read Zadie Smith.

NW. Formally restless, and still unwilling to give up on character.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Rachel Cusk

Who should I read if I love Rachel Cusk?

Deborah Levy is the closest, having made the same move out of memoir at the same time. Annie Ernaux is the French original of the impersonal first person and Nathalie Sarraute made Cusk's central argument about character in 1956. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote the plotless autobiographical novel in 1979. Among contemporaries, Katie Kitamura is the nearest American, Jenny Offill works in fragments, Sheila Heti puts the confessing self back in, and Karl Ove Knausgård reached the opposite solution to the same problem. W. G. Sebald is the writer critics reach for to place her. Zadie Smith is the argument against.

What is Life of M about?

A narrator who tells the actor M that she is thinking of writing her autobiography, and is told to just make it up. The book opens with the genesis of that project and closes with its failure, and in between alternates between scenes from M's life and scenes from the narrator's. It was published by Faber in 2026 and has been widely read as a thinly veiled portrait of Natalie Portman, though Cusk gives the reader no confirmation either way — which is, characteristically, part of the design.

Which Rachel Cusk book should I start with?

Outline (2014), which is where the method arrives fully formed: a writer flies to Athens to teach a course and listens. It is short, and you will know within thirty pages whether the voice is for you. If it works, read Transit and Kudos straight after — they are one book in three parts. Second Place (2021) is the most conventionally gripping. Come to Parade and Life of M last; they assume you already know what she does.

Why did she stop writing memoir?

Because of what happened when she did. A Life's Work (2001), about motherhood, and Aftermath (2012), about her divorce, attracted hostility that went well beyond the books, and a subject of The Last Supper (2009) sued her. She told The Guardian in 2014 that her mode of autobiography had come to an end because she could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry, and described the period as creative death. The Outline trilogy is the form she built out of that.

Is Parade worth reading?

Only if you are already committed. It won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2024, which exists precisely for fiction that breaks the mould, and admirers consider it her furthest reach: four sections about artists all designated G, with no continuous narrator holding it together. Reviewers were openly divided — Dwight Garner called it skippable for all but her most devoted readers, and others found even fans would be daunted. Read Outline, Transit, Kudos and Second Place first, then decide.

What does she mean about character being dead?

She told The Guardian in 2014 that autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts, and that description and character are dead or dying in reality as well as in art — that inventing a John and a Jane and having them do things together had come to seem fake and embarrassing. It is a real position with a long history: Nathalie Sarraute argued much the same in 1956. Zadie Smith is the best contemporary statement of the opposite view.

Are the Outline novels autofiction?

They are usually filed there and they invert the usual arrangement. Standard autofiction gives you a narrator who resembles the author and a plot that may or may not have happened; Cusk gives you a narrator who barely exists on the page and fills the book with other people's stories. Faye is a divorced writer with two sons, as Cusk was, and almost nothing else about her is supplied. What is autobiographical is the position — the listening, the withholding — rather than the events.

What order should I read her books in?

The trilogy is a sequence: Outline (2014), Transit (2016), Kudos (2018). Everything else stands alone. A workable route is the trilogy, then Second Place (2021), then the memoir Aftermath (2012) if you want to know what she was escaping, then Parade (2024) and Life of M (2026). The early novels — Saving Agnes, The Country Life, Arlington Park — are conventional and good, and read like a different writer.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“Autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.”

— Rachel Cusk, interview with The Guardian, 2014.

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