by Rachel Cusk
First published 2026
M is a film star whose face appears everywhere. She has lived with this recognition since childhood. Her fame creates a strange kind of freedom. People accommodate her immediately. Spaces change to fit her needs. Time bends around her schedule. She moves through the same world as everyone else, meeting friends, picking up children from school, walking her dogs. But the normal rules seem suspended around her. A writer decides to observe M closely, hoping to discover her true self. Standing near M makes the writer feel ugly and small. Yet this closeness might reveal something important about what it means to be alive. The writer wonders who is performing for whom. Is M playing a character for the book, or is the writer acting out being M? Cusk examines how we present ourselves in a world filled with images that captivate us more each day. She suggests that life's real worth might come not from beauty but from ugliness, from having a self that has endured.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, psychology, contemporary, adult-fiction
Vibes: intimate, introspective, philosophical, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: identity-crisis, metafiction, observer-observed-dynamic, unreliable-narrator
Period: 21st-century
192 pages · Paperback · Faber And Faber Ltd