Her writing, for all its laconic, pared-back grace, is rich in detail. Cusk is now working on a level that makes it very surprising she has not yet won a major literary prize. Her technical originality is equalled by the compelling nature of her subject matter. (Helen Dunmore)

Cusk is always an exciting writer: striking and challenging, with a distinctive cool prose voice, and behind that coolness something untamed and full of raw force... (Tessa Hadley)

Cusk is intimately concerned with the architecture of women's lives, the institutions and expectations - marriage, motherhood, loyalty - that continue to shape everyday experiences ... [These three books] stand as a landmark in 21st-century English literature, the culmination of an artist's unshakable efforts to forge her own path. (Observer)

'Few fictional projects have been as subtly shape-shifting as Cusk's trilogy, starting with Outline (2014) and Transit (2016), about Faye, a writer who seems to compel people to open up to her, even though she says little, and feels like the shape around which the other characters' stories are arranged. In Kudos, the final novel, people within these stories start telling their owns tories; Faye herself dwindles to only the faintest corporeal presence. The lack of narrative suspense makes us conscious of what is at stake for Cusk: will the end be a let-down? But the closing scene clinches it, triumphantly.' (Telegraph Summer Reads)

'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. Here is the exhilaration of someone fully claiming an exploitative gift.' (Patricia Lockwood LRB)

'A blazing experiment in auto-fiction that seamlessly amalgamates form and substance ... a tour de force of a trilogy.' (Financial Times)

[Cusk] goes deep into every human interaction to find the cause and interrogate the ethics of what we do to the people we love ... When we consider the arc of Rachel Cusk's career, the abstraction in Kudos makes perfect sense. She has found, in this cool and collected new mode, a mature voice that looks abstract yet feels intimate and brightly present. (The Times)

'It's addictive, sharing such a strange, bright vision of the world; and Kudos, this final part of the Faye trilogy, has been eagerly awaited . . . it is a fine novel that deserves to receive . . . a heap of awards in recognition of the vast achievement of the trilogy.' (Guardian Review)

'It's all done with Cusk's usual intelligence and wit, and there are several remarkable passages.' (Sunday Times)

Few fictional projects in recent years have been as subtly shape-shifting as [this] trilogy ... Does the final book fulfil the expressive potential of an undertaking that implicitly insists that such expression be withheld? ... The closing scene, in my opinion, clinches the verdict triumphantly and - this is crucial - incidentally. (Geoff Dyer Daily Telegraph)

A woman on a plane listens to the stranger in the seat next to hers telling her the story of his life: his work, his marriage, and the harrowing night he has just spent burying the family dog. That woman is Faye, who is now on her way to Europe to promote the book she has just published. Once she reaches her destination, the conversations she has with the people she meets - about art, about family, about politics, about love, about sorrow and joy, about justice and injustice - are the most far-reaching questions human beings ask.

These conversations, the last of them with her son, rise dramatically and majestically to a beautiful conclusion.
Kudos completes Rachel Cusk's trilogy with overwhelming power. The trilogy is one of the great achievements in fiction.