A Line Drawn or Printed: Six Routes Through Madrid

Marshall has created something remarkable. Writing with intellectual lucidity, carving out her narrative in spare, elegant prose, she elicits an almost visceral emotional response…An excoriatingly, triumphantly, honest new voice.
– Anna Beer, Eve Bites Back and Death of an Englishman

The deft writing and often confessional tone make it startlingly, deliciously personal yet the changes of pace and point of view, sometimes into fiction, sometimes into brief word bites or prose images, save it from being a typical memoir…This is a sown quilt of memories and sensations laid out for us, or perhaps over us…This has the makings of a cult classic.
– James Hartley, The Madrid Review

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Life journeys us, whether we want it to or not. But it’s up to us what we do with those unexpected and sometimes startling pivots.

The essays and stories in A Line Drawn or Printed trace the physical and emotional journeying of a woman who moves from the UK to Madrid in midlife, seeking reinvention, adventure and meaning.

Against the backdrop of the sensuous Spanish capital and following the soft hum of commuter trains, the book maps the city through themes of love, the body, leave-taking, cities and choosing to be other.

With poetic precision and disarming honesty, the essays explore how places and events etch themselves into our identity - and how meaning is often found not in an endpoint, but in the act of moving through.

Jayne Marshall is from the UK but lives in Madrid, Spain. She is an editor and a fiction writer and essayist. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologies around the world, including as a nominee for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (UK). She holds the Master's in Creative Writing, with distinction, from the University of Oxford. She also writes a regular column for 'The Madrid Review.'