Parade

Parade is a 2024 novel by the British writer Rachel Cusk, published in English the same year by Faber & Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, and winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. The book is short and divided into four parts, titled "The Stuntman", "The Midwife", "The Diver" and "The Spy"; the parts are loosely connected, with the characters linked by the shared initial "G". The novel follows a group of artists all named "G": a painter who abruptly begins painting upside down midway through his career, then paints his wife inverted too and even deliberately "ugly", and these paintings become a great success; a twenty-two-year-old woman painter who leaves home for another country to escape her parents' disapproval, only for her work to draw her future husband's contempt; a woman in the streets of Paris inexplicably attacked by a stranger, who flees but first turns back to study his victim the way an artist studies a canvas; and a mother who dies, leaving her children to face the stories she told, the roles she assigned each of them, and the restrained love she once offered. Elsewhere, a man hides his work behind a string of pseudonyms to avoid his parents, while his brother does the exact opposite. Cusk continues the experimental approach of the Outline trilogy, weakening continuous plot and blurring person and identity, so that the narrative jumps between fragments of several Gs' lives and the novel becomes a meditation on art and morality, gender and performance, motherhood and freedom, family and violence. Some critics have described the book as a carousel revolving around how artists shape themselves and are shaped by themselves, cold and sharp in equal measure.