02/03/2025
Dunnett’s labored debut features three women from different timelines who struggle to survive in an increasingly dysfunctional multiverse. Bea is an unremarkable shopkeeper’s wife in London’s East End after WWI; Kay is a hard-partying queer artist in modern day London; and Ess lives two centuries in the future as a member of a survivalist cult that’s camped out on the city’s war-torn outskirts. Ess happens on a box of old diaries—including Bea’s, in which she recorded multiple sightings of an angel. Meanwhile, Kay turns out to be related to Bea’s husband, Ade, and her work in a library leads her to a time portal. Eventually, the three women meet through time travel and, against a desolate wintry background, each marvels in her own way about the weird experience. The slow-moving plot builds to a frustrating anti-climax that elides action in favor of more reflection. The specter of climate catastrophe adds some sense of urgency, but the narrative is weighed down by cumbersome backstories and an expansive cast of secondary characters. Though Dunnett admirably attempts to give each heroine a distinctive voice, the prose in each section underwhelms (Kay, who alone narrates in first person, observes at a party that “the music was incredibly loud. I felt incredibly intimate with it.”) This disappoints. (Apr.)
Praise for A Line You Have Traced
"Its prose urgent, elegant, and alarming, A Line You Have Traced is a startling speculative novel that muses through the implications of action and inaction in the face of injustice." —Foreword Reviews, starred review
"Dunnett's time-hopping novel, reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, is a good example of character-driven literary sci-fi." —Library Journal
"Dunnett blends cli-fi with a little bit of sf to create a fascinating novel, adding feminist sensibilities along the way. Each character’s point of view is distinct and describes the world as they see it in a relatable way. Even the future is accessible, though daunting in the changes it depicts. Recommended." —Booklist
"Lyrical."—Kirkus Reviews
"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 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
“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
03/01/2025
DEBUT Between world wars, unfulfilled housewife Bea records visits from an otherworldly figure she believes is an angel. In the present, Kay fixates on Bea's journal while drifting through life. Further into a collapsing future, Ess finds the journal in a box before being recruited to ensure the survival of her commune. Across three centuries, a tenuous thread of history connects these women, who each face grim and uncertain futures. Bea, Kay, and Ess have been sidelined in favor of others' narratives, but this very periphery makes them valuable when Ess's comrades discover a method of time travel that relies on incidental connections, which they intend to use to preserve their preferred future. This conceit means Dunnett's heroines are somewhat passive within a slow-moving narrative. However, patient readers will experience three character studies emphasizing the value of small lives and small acts of resistance. VERDICT Dunnett's time-hopping novel, reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, is a good example of character-driven literary sci-fi.—Erin Niederberger
2025-03-08
Dunnett’s speculative novel traces three Londoners through a slow apocalypse.
In London’s post–WWI Jewish East End, shopkeeper’s wife Bea minds her business. While her best friend, CeeCee, is organizing rent strikes and demonstrating against fascists, she’s more concerned with the unwanted advances of her husband’s pompous friend, Haich, and with the angel who appears to her periodically, bringing with it “a feeling of vague irritation, and a strong flavor of peace.” She records these otherworldly incursions in a thin red notebook, picked up three generations later by her great-granddaughter Kay, a temp worker who stumbles, perpetually hungover, through present-day London’s queer nightlife with her friends El and Cue. Kay sleeps in Cue’s bed and attends El’s experimental drag shows, but she doesn’t tell her compatriots about the time travelers she has imagined visiting her since childhood or her fixation on her great-grandmother’s diary. In a future London laid bare by mass poverty and climate collapse, Ess lives on the “unloved outskirts of the city,” gardening for a newly established branch of the Network, a left-aligned collective that her mother calls a cult. In accordance with the beliefs of the “Basin” that the world is in its “Last Human Chapter,” Ess has been voluntarily sterilized. While organizing the papers of her mother’s friend Mr. J, she comes across Bea’s notebook, passed down from Mr. J’s own great-grandparents and now faded to pink. She receives an invitation from another branch of the Network, who believe that through Ess’ circuitous connection to Kay’s London, they can—and are, in fact, morally obliged to—help her travel backward in time. Dunnett’s languorous prose evokes the beauty and unease of a slow-dying world. Kay sprints to the supermarket under a “blue, hard dusk”; Ess pulls up an unremarkable stone with “a tart, metallic look to it that made her think of the inside of a very rare steak.” These passages often overpower the diaphanous narrators that deliver them. Bea, Ess, and Kay are oddly dissociated from their interpersonal relationships, and as ambassadors of their time periods, they read as all but interchangeable. The meditations that move through them—on reproduction, queer kinship, climate grief, and the permeability of time—are nevertheless profound.
A digressive, lyrical climate novel.
