Reading Order
Transit Reading Order
Rachel Cusk's Transit (2016) is the second novel of the Outline trilogy — the narrator has returned to London after the Athens trip of Outline, is renovating a dilapidated flat she has bought in a new neighborhood, and is teaching creative writing and attending to her two sons. As in Outline, she narrates the stories of the people she encounters — a neighbor, students, a hairdresser, an old boyfriend, her ex-husband's relatives — and through these conversations constitutes, in negative space, a portrait of her own life and state of mind.
Where to start
Outline
Complete Transit Book List
Transit — Frequently Asked Questions
Can I read Transit before Outline?
Transit can be read as a stand-alone — it does not recap or depend on plot events from Outline, because the trilogy has almost no plot in the conventional sense. However, reading Outline first gives you the opportunity to enter Cusk's formal project when it is newest and most surprising, and to understand what Transit is doing as a continuation and development of that project. Most readers who start with Transit and love it immediately read Outline, finding it slightly more formally striking as the original innovation.
What is Transit by Rachel Cusk about?
Transit follows the same unnamed narrator from Outline after her return to London — renovating a flat she has bought in a changing neighborhood, teaching creative writing, parenting her two sons on alternating weeks, and meeting a succession of people whose stories she narrates in detail while revealing almost nothing directly about herself. The conversations include a neighbor whose flooding causes the renovation difficulties, a hairdresser with an unhappy marriage, a cousin by marriage at a family reunion, a former boyfriend, and students at her creative writing course.
Is Transit the best book in the Outline trilogy?
Opinion is divided. Outline is the most formally revolutionary and the most widely read. Transit is often considered the most emotionally immediate — the renovation metaphor for the narrator's self-rebuilding is slightly more accessible than the Athens setting of Outline or the literary-festival setting of Kudos. Kudos is the most abstract and the most difficult, and tends to be preferred by the trilogy's most devoted readers. Most critics consider the three books a single work and resist ranking them individually.
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