The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life during times of great transformation. The five people whose lives converge here are also haunted by family -- the longing for love, the struggle to connect.  A young pregnant mother wrestles with utterly changed circumstances; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can't fully understand. Accidental connections and overlapping relationships build a complex family portrait: all are linked by the elemental impact of children on adult lives. This profound evocation of family and its magnetic bonds reveals the mysterious forces that separate us from those we love and bind us to what we no longer understand. The Lucky Ones will stop you cold with its startling precision and power. Demonstrating a rare gift for illuminating "the bustling concourses of life" without sacrificing emotional depth or complexity, this rare and stunning novel confirms Rachel Cusk's place among our most incisive writers. The women in these five linked vignettes are all connected to a journalist named Serena Porter, either personally or as readers of the weekly column she writes about her family life. While they struggle to understand their painful and awkward responses to lovers and children, she spins the raw material of motherhood and marriage into witty and topical dispatches. Of course, much of what Serena writes is factitious, both in its details (she freely appropriates an acquaintance's experience as her own) and in the breezy complacency that it projects; Cusk seems to suggest that our true thoughts about love and family defy articulation. Such is her gift for capturing women's psychology and their sense of their place in the world that the novel achieves what Serena's column cannot: a fresh and compassionate portrait of a generation's feelings about motherhood. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker In her insightful fourth novel, Whitbread Award winner Cusk, author of Saving Agnes (1993), incisively cuts to the core of parenthood and its effect on marriage and female self-esteem. Cusk introduces a cast of characters diverse in age and gender, apparently autonomous but actually tenuously tied by threads of coincidence. These include a wrongly imprisoned young woman who has to surrender her newborn, a group of newlyweds on holiday who are either escaping their children or professing not to want any, a middle-aged and childless divorcee struggling to understand her inability to love, an acerbic mother who relishes her grown daughter's insecurities, and a doting mother who wonders if she will become redundant after her children are grown. All are perceptively drawn by Cusk, their motives and relationships dissected with a surgeon's skill. Connections between even the most disparate characters are gradually revealed as the author brings the novel full circle. Lacking the hilarity of her earlier works, this poignant, evocative novel is meant to be savored. Deborah Donovan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Cusk has a gift for articulating fluid, unsettling emotions just beneath the surface of consciousness.” — Entertainment Weekly “Witty, trenchant and…startling.” — Library Journal “Insightful…perceptively drawn…poignant, evocative and meant to be savored.” — Booklist “Gorgeous, languorous writing.” — Publishers Weekly “Impressively written.” — Marie Claire (UK) “If great fiction puts into words something about ourselves that we didn’t know we knew, this is it.” — Daily Mail (London) “Sharp observation of character, vivid imagistic descriptions.” — Independent on Sunday “You want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch.” — Independent Magazine “A lovely book.” — Irish Independent “[Cusk’s] intelligence and emotional honesty give a sense of having experienced, rather than read, this book…extraordinary.” — People “Witty and topical…a fresh and compassionate portrait.” — The New Yorker “Subtle and satisfying...a brilliant collection.” — Boston Globe The Lucky Ones is a novel about creating and sustaining life during times of great transformation. The five people whose lives converge here are also haunted by family -- the longing for love, the struggle to connect.  A young pregnant mother wrestles with utterly changed circumstances; a new father searches for a sign of the man he used to be; a daughter yearns for a lost childhood; and a mother reaches out in bewilderment to a child she can't fully understand. Accidental connections and overlapping relationships build a complex family portrait: all are linked by the elemental impact of children on adult lives. This profound evocation of family and its magnetic bonds reveals the mysterious forces that separate us from those we love and bind us to what we no longer understand. The Lucky Ones will stop you col