A Line Made By Walking
by Sara Baume
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Pub Date Feb 16 2017 | Archive Date Apr 26 2017
Random House UK, Cornerstone | William Heinemann
Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘When I finished Sara Baume’s new novel I immediately felt sad that I could not send it in the post to the late John Berger. He, too, would have loved it and found great joy in its honesty, its agility, its beauty, its invention. Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.’ Colum McCann
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.
Advance Praise
'After a remarkable and deservedly award-winning debut, here is a novel of uniqueness, wonder, recognition, poignancy, truth-speaking, quiet power, strange beauty and luminous bedazzlement. Once again, I’ve been Baumed.' Joseph O'Connor
'Unflinching, at times uncomfortable, and always utterly compelling, A Line Made By Walking is among the best accounts of grief, loneliness and depression that I have ever read. Every word of it rings true, the truth of hard-won knowledge wrested from the abyss. Shot through with a wild, yearning melancholy, it is nevertheless mordantly witty. It felt, to me, kindred to Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: not just on a superficial level, a young woman seeking solace in art, but in the urgent depth of its quest to understand and articulate what it means to make art, and what art might mean for the individual, lost and lonely; how it might bring us out of, or back to, ourselves.' Lucy Caldwell
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781785150418 |
| PRICE | £12.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 320 |
Featured Reviews
Writerful B, Book Trade Professional
A Line Made by Walking has all the elements of a great book and should sit comfortably alongside other works of literature featuring ‘outsiders’. Baume displays a natural story-telling flair and is one of the most exciting female writers to emerge from Ireland in recent years.
Read the full book review at Writerful Books
Mandy J, Reviewer
I really enjoyed this exploration of a young woman's breakdown after city life becomes too much for her and she retreats to her dead grandmother's vacant property to try to regain her balance. Frankie’s voice is so compelling as we share her thoughts and feelings and I found the book a profound and moving meditation on depression, family, art and nature. Reading this beautifully written and original book is an immersive experience, one that will long stay with me. Sara Baume has a sure touch when it comes to writing of such difficult issues, as well as a keen ear and eye for the world around her. Much as I enjoyed her first novel, this one is possibly even better as the narrative voice is so authentic. Highly recommended.
Siobhan D, Reviewer
A Line Made By Walking is about Frankie, a twenty five year old artist who moves from Dublin into her grandmother’s old bungalow in the countryside near her parents’ house, and what she does in this retreat from the world. Written in a relatable, immediate style, Baume’s novel is about loss, of self, of how you thought the world was, and of the grandmother whose home she stays in and the dead animals that she finds and photographs. It is about being in your twenties and feeling lost.
Frankie’s photographing of dead animals and her attempts to test her art knowledge through finding works that fit the theme of whatever she is thinking about strike a chord for anyone whose creativity or knowledge seem to be unable to find an outlet or are languishing away whilst their owner is unsure of life. The book is full of knowledge, about artwork, nature, and other things, and how knowing things cannot help against difficulties of life, loneliness, and depression. Details in the book, from Frankie’s description of getting caught obsessively smelling her old carpet to a reference to The Land Before Time to describe a leaf, help to make it a vivid and moving account of a relatable subject, feeling lost and alone in the world.
Comparisons to Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City feel inevitable, with art and loneliness deeply intertwined in both, but in Baume’s novel art does not seem to offer the same comparison or comfort that loneliness is not new, but rather a frame of reference for Frankie to try and cling to and use to create order. A Line Made By Walking is full of quotable lines about being in your twenties, being sad, and finding the world an overwhelming place, and it is a book to be savoured whether you are experiencing that right now or have done so in the past.
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