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The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel
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Published:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
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Checked Out
Description

Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and grace in his daily piano study. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife, who has accepted a demanding full-time job? How can this be good for Alexa?
Tonie is increasingly seduced away from domestic life by the harder, headier world of work, where long-forgotten memories of ambition are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle, alive to previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow the fortunes of Tonie, Thomas, and his brothers and their families: Howard, the successful, indulgent brother, and his gregarious wife, Claudia; and Leo, lacking in confidence and propped up by Susie, his sharp-tongued, heavy-drinking wife. At the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents descend on their children to question and undermine them.
The Bradshaw Variations reveals how our choices, our loves, and the family life we build will always be an echo—a variation—of a theme played out in our own childhood. This masterful and often shockingly funny novel, Rachel Cusk's seventh, shows a prizewinning writer at the height of her powers.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Edition:
1
Street Date:
03/30/2010
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781429931779
ASIN:
B003DYGNTC
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cusk. (2010). The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel. 1 Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cusk. 2010. The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cusk, The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Rachel Cusk. The Bradshaw Variations: A Novel. 1 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:17:20
Date Updated:
Dec 08, 2020 06:10:01
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Mar 27, 2022 09:11:23
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        Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967 and spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles before finishing her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. She read English at New College, Oxford, and has travelled extensively in Spain and Central America. She is the author of six novels. The first, Saving Agnes (1993), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. In The Lucky Ones (2003) she uses a series of five narratives, loosely linked by the experience of parenthood, to write of life's transformations, of what separates us from those we love and what binds us to those we no longer understand. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her latest novel is Outline (2014).

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title
The Bradshaw Variations
fullDescription

Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and grace in his daily piano study. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife, who has accepted a demanding full-time job? How can this be good for Alexa?
Tonie is increasingly seduced away from domestic life by the harder, headier world of work, where long-forgotten memories of ambition are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle, alive to previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow the fortunes of Tonie, Thomas, and his brothers and their families: Howard, the successful, indulgent brother, and his gregarious wife, Claudia; and Leo, lacking in confidence and propped up by Susie, his sharp-tongued, heavy-drinking wife. At the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents descend on their children to question and undermine them.
The Bradshaw Variations reveals how our choices, our loves, and the family life we build will always be an echo—a variation—of a theme played out in our own childhood. This masterful and often shockingly funny novel, Rachel Cusk's seventh, shows a prizewinning writer at the height of her powers.

reviews
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      • source: Miranda Purves, Elle
      • content:

        "Astonishing . . . Like a genius gem cutter, Cusk continues to brazenly flout the pure realism that dominates current literary fiction in favor of a Woolfean approach that uses style and sensory impressionism to chisel out inner turmoil. The Bradshaw Variations is a timely, necessary story . . . I'm escaping to the metaphorical forest with a pile of Cusk novels."

      • premium: False
      • source: James Lasdun, The Guardian
      • content: "Again and again [Cusk] provides that primal joy of literature: the sense of things being seen afresh."
      • premium: False
      • source: Hilary Mantel, The Guardian
      • content: "A virtuoso . . . [Cusk's] interiors whisper and shiver, as if Virginia Woolf had flitted through . . . It is the author's mix of scorn and compassion that is so bracing. Sometimes she complicates simple things, snarling them in a cat's cradle of abstraction, but just as often, a sentence rewards with its absolute and unexpected precision."
      • premium: False
      • source: Julie Myerson, Financial Times
      • content: "Frighteningly sharp . . . [I was] affected and moved, [and] at times I just wanted to punch the air in a frenzy of delighted recognition . . . Every single one of these honestly drawn and heartsinkingly recognizable characters . . . gave me real, crackling pleasure . . . This isn't the first novel of Cusk's to make me laugh out loud, but it is the first to have really moved me."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        November 16, 2009
        The Bradshaw family of suburban London is discontent. Thomas Bradshaw has taken a sabbatical from his job to learn to play the piano; his wife, Tonie, has become head of a university English department; their eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, watches as father and mother begin to suffocate under the failure of their expectations. The Bradshaws' brothers, sisters, parents, and in-laws, though sometimes faintly amusing, are no better off. Sister-in-law Claudia, a painter, never paints, blaming her nonproductivity on husband Howard, Thomas's older brother. Little brother Leo and his uneducated wife, Susie, drink too much—public knowledge because their children tattle on them—and the older generation of parents disapproves of them all. Cusk (Arlington Park
        ) dissects her characters with a surgical precision, and all can be diagnosed with the same bourgeois malady: acute but indeterminate angst about the nature of existence. Cusk is a gifted writer who has a knack for razor-sharp characterizations, but the lack of plot—everyone is sad, little is done—is a serious detriment.

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shortDescription

Since quitting work to look after his eight-year-old daughter, Alexa, Thomas Bradshaw has found solace and grace in his daily piano study. His pursuit of a more artistic way of life shocks and irritates his parents and in-laws. Why has he swapped roles with Tonie Swann, his intense, intellectual wife, who has accepted a demanding full-time job? How can this be good for Alexa?
Tonie is increasingly seduced away from domestic life by the harder, headier world of work, where long-forgotten memories of ambition are awakened. She soon finds herself outside their tight family circle, alive to previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of a year full of crisis and revelation, we follow the fortunes of Tonie, Thomas, and his brothers and their families: Howard, the successful, indulgent brother, and his gregarious wife, Claudia; and Leo, lacking in confidence and propped up by Susie, his sharp-tongued, heavy-drinking wife. At the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw...

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