I'd never seen a first edition, let alone a hardback of this book. Really lovely copy.

Outline follows a writer teaching a summer course in Athens, but the book’s real subject is the negative space of selfhood. Across conversations with strangers, students, friends, and fellow writers, Rachel Cusk builds a novel out of listening, projection, memory, vanity, confession, and the quiet violence of being interpreted. Over the course of the novel, we see how a person can appear most clearly through the stories other people tell around them.

It’s lucid, cool, and unnervingly exact — a novel that seems almost simple until you realise it has quietly removed several walls. It is the first in a trilogy, followed by Transit and then finally Kudos. A strong pick for readers drawn to autofiction, formally precise literary fiction, women thinking in rooms and near bodies of water, and books where the plot is less “what happens” than “what language does to a life.”

First American edition, second printing, FSG hardback, 2015. Very good in dust jacket, with light jacket wear and minor bumping to corners. Clean internally, aside some light pencil marginalia on the first pages, easily rubbed out.