The Last Supper

Rachel Cusk

Casting off another winter, Rachel Cusk and her family set out for Italy in search of meaning, beauty, a cure for everything. The Last Supper takes us on their three-month long journey: the revelations and disappointments; the Raphaels and rented villas; the Piero della Francesca trail and tourist furnaces of Amalfi. In this early triumph of her award-winning career, Cusk turns the travel memoir inside out, upending tropes of the genre. Incisive and brutally funny, she lays bare our deepest impulses: towards indulgence and escape, narcissism and cruelty, happy materialism and transcendence.