A Line Made By Walking - Softcover

Baume, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1328915816 ISBN 13: 9781328915818

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2018

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize

“Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.”—Colum McCann
 
“Baume leaves nothing unturned in this dark and sometimes funny excavation of the human heart.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“Fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator’s mind.” —Guardian

Struggling to cope with urban life—and life in general—Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family’s rural house on “turbine hill,” vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here—her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school—and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life.
            As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance. With “prose that makes sure we look and listen,”* Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life.

*Atlantic
 
“Baume’s writing is near-faultless.” —Financial Times
 
“A novel of uniqueness, wonder, recognition, poignancy, truth-speaking, quiet power, strange beauty, and luminous bedazzlement.” — Joseph O’Connor

About this title

About the Author

SARA BAUME studied fine art before earning a master’s in creative writing. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award. She is also the recipient of the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award and the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, and lives in Cork, Ireland.

Review

“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

“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

“Fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator’s mind . . . [In A Line Made by Walking] there is a reminder of the beauty that can be found when you allow yourself to look slowly and sadly at the world.” — Guardian

“Baume writes lovely prose about unimaginable pain. A clear-eyed, beautiful rendering of a woman struggling against despair.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Fans of Colum McCann and Richard Russo will adore this masterful and meditative novel that doesn’t emphasize plot over atmosphere.” — Booklist, starred review

“A spellbinding meditation on art and life.” — Bookseller
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1328915816
• ISBN 13: 9781328915818
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336