A Line Made by Walking, by the critically acclaimed author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither, is a beautiful and elegant novel by a writer whose empathy shines a bright, piercing light on the heart-breaking realities of being alive.
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.
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*
A fascinating portrait of an artist’s breakdown in rural Ireland …
a remarkable ability to generate narrative pace while eschewing
plot, making it enough for the reader to observe a mind observing
the world … it’s fascinating, because of the cumulative power of
the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable
intelligence of the narrator’s mind … Art may also require a
willingness to question the ordinary that is incompatible with
conventional criteria of sanity. One of the most radical aspects of
this novel is its challenge to received wisdom about mental illness
… There are no answers here, but there is a reminder of the beauty
that can be found when you allow yourself to look slowly and sadly
at the world.
*Guardian*
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*
Extraordinarily compelling … What makes it so gripping as that the
reader is trapped in Frankie’s mind as much as she is; every tiny
detail is magnified into metaphysical significance that she cannot
understand and that the reader cannot parse … Frankie’s surreal and
yet understandable mind-patterns are eloquent as well as awful … On
the dust-jacket Joseph O’Connor says that Baume is a ‘writer
touched by greatness.’ I think she is bruised by it.
*The Spectator*
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*
This is, explicitly, a book about art and “sadness”, but it is
neither affected nor mawkish … This is the challenge that Baume has
evidently set herself – to find a fresh perspective – and she has
excelled ... Baume’s is an immensely sensitive balancing act of a
book, one that declines to resolve its tensions. Towards its
conclusion, Frankie muses on how her odyssey ought to “end in a
substantial event”. The adjective is strikingly ironic in view of
Baume’s actual denouement, and further evidence of just how
carefully calibrated this original and affecting novel is.
*Observer*
A Line Made by Walking is a profound, ruminative study of a young
woman who takes photographs of dead animals … A Line Made by
Walking is self-interrogating autofiction plus art criticism in a
distinctly Irish mode: Sara Baume has as much in common with, say,
Maggie Nelson as she does with Edna O’Brien … Brilliantly
understated reflections on art and life.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Baume’s mixing of the visual arts and fiction is as satisfying as
Ali Smith’s … [a] raw-nerved and wonderful novel.
*The New Statesman*
This is a masterclass in the power of prose … A brilliant work that
will likely resonate with anyone who’s ever felt a little lost in
their twenties and beyond.
*The Herald*
Baume’s conceit is imaginative and well organised, her writing
pellucid and open.
*The Times*
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