The TITLE Review: Life of M

A private plane, a countdown, and The Booker Prize most talked-about longlist novel...

Rachel Cusk's Life of M has become the book everyone's asking us about, and it isn't just because of the writing.

A writer sets out to understand M, one of the most famous women alive, by paying close attention to her life. M appears to live like everyone else. She meets friends, collects her kids from school, walks the dog. But fame has rearranged the rules around her so completely that ordinary life no longer quite applies. The writer wants to find the truth underneath that image and spends the whole book chasing it without ever settling for an easy answer.

Here's the part that's made this the book of the season: readers and critics have widely speculated that M is closely modelled on Natalie Portman's public life, right down to details from her career as a child actor. Neither Cusk nor Portman nor the publisher has confirmed or denied it. That silence has only made people more convinced there's something to it.

Cusk has spent her career taking the conventions of the novel apart, and here she turns that same scrutiny on fame itself: what's left of someone once the whole world has already decided what they're like before they've said a word. It's unsettling, occasionally very funny, and hard to categorise. You finish it not entirely sure what you just read, which is precisely the effect Cusk seems to be going for.

Whatever you make of the speculation, this is a sharp, strange, original book that would be getting attention on its own terms even without the gossip. The gossip just means everyone's already talking about it before they've read a page.

Outline by Rachel Cusk – if you haven't read her before, this is where to start

Trust by Hernan Diaz – another novel obsessed with who gets to tell someone else's story

Nobody involved, not Cusk, not Portman, not the publisher, has said a word about whether M is who everyone thinks she is. Some readers think that's coincidence. Others think staying quiet is exactly the point.

Either way, come in and pick up a copy in-store at TITLE Barangaroo or Surry Hills.... before your book club beats you to it or here

And yes...we also host book clubs too if you're interested.