This award-winning novel by contemporary Canadian-British writer Rachel Cusk (b. 1968) consists of ten encounters and conversations. During an unbearably hot summer in Athens, the protagonist, a renowned novelist, teaches a course on creative writing. Her new acquaintances and interlocutors include neighbors, students, and professors, who readily talk about themselves—sharing their beliefs, dreams, fantasies, anxieties, and regrets. Against the backdrop of their stories, as if by contrast, a portrait of the narrator emerges—a woman learning to live with the consciousness of great loss. 'Contour' is the first novel in a trilogy that changed notions of this traditional literary form and significantly expanded the boundaries of contemporary prose. This is the first time the book has been published in Russian.