Overview

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. Bea’s 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 grandmother’s house Kay finds a strange but careful record of an angel’s 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…

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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 Tamás, author of Witch

‘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.' 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

Author Information

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.

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