The Temporary

Written by Rachel Cusk

Narrated by Antonia Beamish

Ralph Loman works in an unsatisfying job, for a free London newspaper, when Francine Snaith, a temporary secretary for a corporate finance firm, unexpectedly crosses his path at a party. Her beauty ignites a blaze of excitement in his troubled heart. But Francine is ravenous for attention, driven by a thirst for conquest, and when Ralph tries politely to extricate himself, he finds he is bound by chains of consequence from which it seems there is no escape. The Temporary paints a merciless portrait of the cut and thrust of modern romance, work and life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Release date: Dec 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780571360642

Rachel Cusk

RACHEL CUSK is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Second Place and the Outline trilogy. She has written three memoirs—A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath—as well as the novels Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Temporary; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. Twice a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists for 2003, Rachel Cusk is Canadian and lives in Paris.

Reviews for The Temporary

[Korea Kim · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Cusk was a horrible writer when she was younger. When she was young and married she,was a mysoginist who saw men as real people with full lives and women as objects described by their weight and by how men view them. Ofc since getting divorced and growing up she's become less ignorant but I find her early work unreadable.