'We can fix what we have done. We can undo the mistakes our ancestors made. We can set right what has been done wrong... You are the first step.'

In a silverware shop, a young wife works alongside her husband. Amid growing political turmoil, Bea finds solace in the local marsh, where she is visited recurrently by a mysterious presence, logging each appearance carefully in a scarlet journal. In a time like now, Kay navigates friendship, queerness and the temporary job market, whilst contemplating the significance of her life in a world with such an uncertain future. At her grandmother's house she finds an intriguing record of an angel's visits. A hundred years into the future, outsiders have banded together to live off-grid away from a corrupt government and a city wracked by oppression and climate change. When Ess is chosen for a virgin mission, a journey into the past to save the present, she is guided only by a well-thumbed red notebook... Set against the shifting scape of East London marshes and expanding over three centuries, this is the breathtaking, urgent story of three women separated by history but threaded together by unknown forces.

A glorious timeslip novel from the magnificent mind of debut author Roisin Dunnett

About the Author

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.

Reviews

'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 Tamas, author of Witch

Book Information
ISBN 9780861547494
Author Roisin Dunnett
Format Hardback
Page Count 400
Imprint Magpie
Publisher Oneworld Publications