“This is a novel of ideas, intelligent, original in form and content, and brilliantly engaging . . . Kudos is rich and compelling. It confirms Rachel Cusk’s status as one of the most interesting contemporary writers―avant-garde, highly original, challenging but entirely accessible.”  - Irish Times

“[Cusk’s trilogy is] likely to live on, inflecting our thoughts, offering an experience that feels closer to thinking than to reading.”  - The Times Literary Supplement

“Cusk has found a new way to say the things she has always said: quieter, but to devastating effect.” - Evening Standard (London)

“The [Outline] trilogy is a bravura interrogation of the social habits and assumptions that, assembled together, start to look suspiciously like a man’s world in which women just so happen to live . . . [Outline, Transit, and Kudos] stand as a landmark in 21st-century English literature, the culmination of an artist’s unshakable efforts to forge her own path.” - The Guardian

“Brilliantly aware without being indulgent or preachy, this novel has the intense beauty of form that has marked Cusk’s trilogy from the beginning, and the final installment does not disappoint.”  - Booklist (starred review)

“Cusk’s final book in a trilogy (after Outline and Transit) expertly concludes the story of protagonist Faye . . . As always, Cusk’s ear for dialogue and language is stunning. The author ends Faye’s trilogy with yet another gem.”  - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brilliantly accomplished and uncompromisingly dark.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Does [Kudos] live up to its title? In short, unequivocally. Despite their ostensible uniformity, each of the three volumes delights in a different way. Outline dazzled with its intrepid originality, while the low hum of violence that ran through Transit had a mesmeric quality, and now Kudos, which builds to a sparkling crescendo, thrills at its own more serene tempo. Regarded as a whole, it’s a tour de force of a trilogy.” - Financial Times (London)

“Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life . . . She moves through it as a blasted centre full only of instinct and superhuman hearing and hackles . . . The three novels blend together, and not to their detriment. Their of-a-wholeness is why they are so often referred to as ‘a project’. And the pleasure of this project is a rare one: it is the pleasure of a person figuring out exactly what she ought to be doing.” - London Review of Books

“Kudos is an education . . . [Cusk] has found, in this cool and collected new mode, a mature voice that looks abstract yet feels intimate and brightly present . . . Cusk has inherited the gift of holding our attention as she shows us the things that humans do.” - The Times (London)

“These crystalline and exquisitely elliptical works have helped define the genre of autofiction . . . Coolly detached, narcotically gorgeous . . . Like all great art, this novel consistently eludes us in leaps of grace and daring . . . Modern life has rarely been articulated with such compression and epigrammatic precision. These are texts, finally, to read and revisit, lean, oracular, irreducible.”  - Los Angeles Times

“Every element of the [Outline] novels conveys a strenuous sense of discipline. The effect is of watching an oracle divine fearsome and inscrutable truths from on high, then render them into stories fit for mortals . . . Mesmerizing.” - The Cut

“Cusk commandeers reality . . . An object lesson in rigor, elegance, and fury.” - Harper's Magazine

“High-stakes and bracingly compelling . . . Cusk’s brilliantly reasoned argument against the false security of narrative continues to hit a nerve.”  - Vogue

“The darkly stirring conclusion to the acclaimed Outline trilogy.”  - O magazine

“Cusk’s style―precise and unsentimental―is transfixing and consuming.”  - Lit Hub

“With the release of Kudos, these three novels can now be appreciated―and will surely be looked back on―as one of the literary masterpieces of our time.”  - Washington Post

“The exhilarating finale of Rachel Cusk’s magnificently unclassifiable trilogy of novels . . . With her typical acerbic wit, Ms Cusk skewers the pretensions of the literary world while simultaneously upholding the intrinsic value of literature―no small feat . . . A daring bonfire of hypocrisies and emotions.” - The Economist

“Quietly staggering and intellectually entrancing . . . [Cusk’s] writing is silvery and precise . . . These novels are among the most important written in this century so far.”  - The Globe and Mail

“[Cusk] has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears . . . A stark, modern, adamantine new skyscraper on the literary horizon.” - New York Times

“This important trilogy, then, through its eloquent polyphony of voices and opinions, arrives at an idea of feminist art in opposition to the confessional mode that has long been in ascendance. Ms. Cusk’s tools are ambivalence and elusiveness―or, to rearrange James Joyce’s terms of independence: exile, cunning and silence.” - Wall Street Journal

“[The Outline] trilogy by Rachel Cusk has been a revelation. She has a spare, dignified, intensely private―for lack of a better word―writing style. With their guarded, wry, intensely observant female ‘protagonist,’ each novel works as a stand-alone, but as a trilogy it is a triumph of the most subtle but powerful (dare I say) feminist literature. Absolutely gorgeous reading, like being carried on the waves, knowing for certain you’ll reach the shore... or will you?” - Amazon Book Review

“Quietly staggering and intellectually entrancing . . . [Cusk’s] writing is silvery and precise, navigated by elegant syntax that steers its speaker towards revelations of great depth . . . These novels are among the most important written in this century so far.”  - The Globe and Mail

“A triumphant finish to an ambitious, unconventional trilogy cements Cusk’s position as one of today’s most original fiction writers. The charged delicacy of these books is underpinned by what is sure to be their durability as literature.”  - Toronto Star

“Precise and haunting . . . Unforgettable.”  - New York Times

“[Cusk] has achieved something both radical and beautiful . . . [Kudos is] a book about failure that is not, in itself, a failure. In fact, it is a breathtaking success.” - The New Yorker

“Kudos achieves a kind of formal perfection. Rarely does a single word of its exceptionally polished prose seem out of place . . . Cusk has triumphed in the completion of this masterly trilogy.”  - Slate

“A stellar accomplishment.” - The Guardian

“[Kudos] stayed with me long after I had finished it. Composed of a series of conversations, it is captivating and incredibly well written.”  - The Guardian