Overwhelmed by urban life in Dublin, and life in general, artist Frankie, in her 20s, withdraws to live in her late grandmother’s rundown bungalow in the countryside. The novel moves back and forth in time, from her time in the bungalow to the city life she was fleeing to her rural childhood. With limited human interaction, Frankie remains lost in rumination and basic daily survival within the bungalow walls, often thinking of her grandmother and the day she died. This small rural world becomes expansive as she views the bungalow interior – reminding her of her grandmother and her own childhood – and nature around her in minute detail. Eventually she picks up her camera and ventures forth. But it’s not the traditional beauty of nature that she captures; it’s the evidence of death as part of life in the form of the dead animals she passes on her way that capture her attention and lens the most.

While the interactions she has in the countryside now, and has had with people in the past, are often in some way stilted, awkward, it’s through her encounters with these dead animals that she finds herself moved, finding some reconnection with life and its inevitable cycle. Frankie’s narrative is interspersed with self-imposed spot quizzes as she tests herself on works of art or art performances with some link to the experiences and encounters she has during her time in her grandmother’s bungalow; serving as a meditation on life as reflected in art, an anchor in uncertain times, and a way of reconnecting to the Frankie whose life was so immersed in, and enriched by, art.

Unfolding as a series of reflective and contemplative vignettes, this quietly immersive and affecting novel explores themes of life, death, art, mental health, feelings of loneliness and disconnection, and the delicate task of caring for ourselves in a world that is so often overwhelming.  

***

A Line Made by Walking was published by Windmill Books in 2017.

***

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 Byrnes Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish 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, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. A Line Made by Walking is her second novel and her first piece of non-fiction, handiwork, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her third novel, Seven Steeples, was published in April 2022 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. She is based in West Cork where she works also as a visual artist.