A Line Made By Walking

Author/Guide: Sara Baume

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: ‘Art, and sadness, which last forever.’

ISBN: 978-1785150418
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

Struggling to cope with urban life – and with life in general – Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on ‘turbine hill’ that has been vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half-listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven. Her family comes and goes, until they don’t and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here, and the smell of the carpet that started it all.

Finding little comfort in human interaction, Frankie turns her camera lens on the natural world and its reassuring cycle of life and death. What emerges is a profound meditation on the interconnectedness of wilderness, art and individual experience, and a powerful exploration of human frailty.

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Travel Guide

A story about living on the edges of society

A girl, Frankie, living in Dublin and moving to her grandmother’s house which sits on a hill in a valley known as Turbine Hill. She works in an art gallery and starts to see her life and her surroundings through the art works she considers as part of her existence. Her way of seeing the world and trying to make sense of it all.

Because of the house’s location, it has proved difficult to sell, and so Frankie gets to live there for free. This allows her the time and space to be melancholic as well as creative. She photographs much of the local wildlife (dead or alive) and landscapes raw and rugged.

What she sees and what she finds becomes her focus and they then link back to the art which she uses to make sense of it all. She narrates her story by highlighting a number of arts works on such varied subjects such as ‘wind’ and ‘sheds’ and the artists who created them. A tour of life itself and of the Art World in particular.

There is a list of artworks at the back of the book which has inspired this novelwhich including Windmill (Turbine Hill?) by Erik Wesselo