Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558613874
Publication date: 04-15-25

Against a backdrop of growing violence and environmental collapse, three women living centuries apart search for meaning and connection by becoming obsessed with a mysterious red book. 

In post–World War I London, Bea encounters an uncanny figure she believes is an angel as the life she is building in the Jewish East End is threatened by fascists. In contemporary East London’s underground queer scene, Kay parties with her friends while imagining herself visited by time travelers. And years in the future, Ess—part of a collective preparing for the end of human life on earth—prepares to make a journey into the past to possibly help save the present.

A Line You Have Traced asks what we owe to those who will come after us, and what it might cost us.

“I don’t know which I admire more: the casual beauty of the sentences, the cunning of the design, or the tact and compassion with which A Line You Have Traced weaves together its three layers of time into its instructions for the end of our world.” —Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill 

“This is a gloriously innovative, endlessly surprising gut punch of a novel. Dunnett is a dazzlingly original, luminous new voice in fiction. . . . If the novel has any future at all, then this is it.” —Rebecca Tamás, author of Witch