A Line You Have Traced

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Maybe there really had been angels then anything could be true of the past, I thought.


In inter-War London, a young wife helps her new husband in their silverware shop. Beas days are punctuated by customers who, more often than not, come to look but never buy - and the visitations of an angel who flits at the edge of her sight, each appearance carefully logged in the pages of a scarlet journal.


In a time rather like now, Kay works temp jobs and spends nights dancing and arguing politics. Mysterious travellers watch her silently on the tube and in her local supermarket. And at her grandmothers house Kay finds a strange but careful record of an angels visits.


A hundred years hence, outsiders have banded together to live off-grid, trying to evade the surveillance of a corrupt government, and envision utopia on the fringes of a city wracked by oppression and climate change. Ess discovers she has been carefully chosen for a virgin mission, a journey into the past to help save the present, guided only by a well-thumbed red notebook

Reviews

I dont know which I admire more: the casual beauty of the sentences, the cunning of the design, or the tact and compassion with whichA Line You Have Tracedweaves together its three layers of time into its instructions for the end of our world.Francis Spufford, author ofGolden Hill

'This is a gloriously innovative, endlessly surprising gut punch of a novel.Dunnettis a dazzlingly original, luminous new voice in fiction If the novel has any future at all, then this is it.'Rebecca Tams, author ofWitch

Author Bio

Roisin Dunnett is a writer from London. Her fiction pamphlet Animal, Vegetable was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. Her short fiction has been published in Prototype, Hotel, Ambit, Vittles and elsewhere. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths where she was taught by Chris Power and Francis Spufford, and where she was longlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Prize in 2022.