A Line You Have Traced
A novel
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Cloud Atlas meets This Is How You Lose the Time War in this gorgeous speculative novel that explores how a mysterious red journal connects three women born centuries apart in East London.
In the Jewish East End of post-World War I London, Bea, a young shopkeeper's wife, is visited by an uncanny figure she believes is an angel. She tries to understand the meaning of these visits as the life she is building with her new husband is threatened by fascists who are increasingly targeting her friends and neighbors.
Kay spends nights partying with her friends in contemporary East London's underground queer scene, where one of them is gaining fame as a drag queen. She entertains herself by imagining that people she passes on the street are time travelers who have come back in time specifically to visit her. As she becomes infatuated with the brilliant O, she discovers an aged red notebook that seems to be the journal of an ancestor who was also visited by a mystical being.
One hundred years in the future, against a backdrop of climate emergency and violent oppression, Ess lives off the grid as part of a collective that's planning for the end of human life on earth. After uncovering an ancient worn red book in an archive, she is invited to a nearby commune to help with a critical mission: a journey into the past to possibly help save the present.
Epic in scope, with unforgettable characters and a rare clarity of vision, A Line You Have Traced asks profound questions about how we might survive and engage with the world, and with each other, before it's too late.
About this Author
ROISIN DUNNETT is a writer from London, England. 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 at Goldsmiths where she was longlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Prize in 2022.
Reviews
"A Line You Have Traced is a metamorphosis. A love letter. A manifesto on time and becoming. Behold as a queer cast of characters discover the past and the future, fall in love, bravely face the end of the world, undergo inconceivable change, and emerge unapologetically as the most natural thing they can be: themselves." --Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"Think Kailene Bradley's Ministry of Time crossed with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. . . . Endlessly inventive, emotionally resonant and politically alive . . . Roisin Dunnett's debut novel pushes speculative fiction to new heights." --Zing Tsjeng, author of Forgotten Women
"I don't know which I admire more: the casual beauty of the sentences, the cunning of the design, or the tact and compassion with which A Line You Have Traced weaves together its three layers of time into its instructions for the end of our world." --Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill
"This is a gloriously innovative, endlessly surprising gut punch of a novel. Dunnett is a dazzlingly original, luminous new voice in fiction. . . . If the novel has any future at all, then this is it." --Rebecca Tamás, author of Witch
"Magnificent. No word is wasted, and even the most economical of Roisin Dunnett's sentences can make you understand emotions you've never experienced. . . . The subject matter is colossal, but the writing is always intimate, navigating time's expanse through the little people suspended in it and the little ways they (we) try to connect." --Writer and Drag Performer, Sue Gives a F**k
"Dazzles with the scope of its wild weird imagination, and the freshness of its storytelling. Roisin Dunnett is a haunting and magnificent new voice in speculative fiction." --Sam J. Miller, author of Blackfish City
"A stunning debut novel that asks us what do we owe to each other and what trace will we leave on the world. I loved meeting Bea, Kay and Ess and getting lost in their brilliantly imagined worlds." --Elizabeth Lovatt, author of Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line
"Smart and intriguing. Roisin Dunnett is a writer of clarion talent and A Line You Have Traced is an inventive, ambitious novel." --Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man
"In this exhilarating book, Roisin Dunnett brings together three compelling and beautifully drawn worlds and three distinct and powerful voices. You will love each one." --Isabel Greenberg, author of The One Hundred Nights of Hero
"A Line You Have Traced is an ambitious book with plenty to say about history, community, and the ties that bind." --Tobias Carroll for Reactor
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