A Line Made by Walking

Struggling to cope with urban life – and with life in general – Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on ‘turbine hill’ that has been vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half-listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven. Her family come and go, until they don’t and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here, and the smell of the carpet that started it all.Finding little comfort in human interaction, Frankie turns her camera lens on the natural world and its reassuring cycle of life and death. What emerges is a profound meditation on the interconnectedness of wilderness, art and individual experience, and a powerful exploration of human frailty.

About the author

Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art and creative writing and her fiction and criticism have been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals such as the Irish Times, The Guardian, The Stinging Fly and Granta magazine. She has won the Davy Byrne’s Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Literature, an Irish Book Award for Best Newcomer and the Kate O’Brien Award. Her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Desmond Elliott Prize. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A Line Made by Walking is her second novel. She lives in West Cork.

Librarians’ comments:

The novel impresses one by its deep penetration into the soul, mode of perception of the world and its imaginative transformation by the artist. The author’s manner combines a personal touch with a cool objective observation, and that renders fictional characters with throbbing life of their own, comprehending the phenomenon of the Green Island as it reveals itself to a modern eye.

Sarah Baume follows her twenty-something heroine throughout her escape from her life in Dublin, her non-existent career as an artist and the world and people around her to the secluded house of her long-dead grandmother somewhere in the countryside of Ireland, thus refusing to take part in any standardised way of life.