A Line You Have Traced

A Novel

De: Roisin Dunnett

Narrado por: Olivia Mace, Lizzie Schenk, Gemma Lawrence

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.

©2025 Roisin Dunnett (P)2025 Knopf Canada

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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