A Line You Have Traced

Dunnett’s labored debut features three women from different timelines who struggle to survive in an increasingly dysfunctional multiverse. Bea is an unremarkable shopkeeper’s wife in London’s East End after WWI; Kay is a hard-partying queer artist in modern day London; and Ess lives two centuries in the future as a member of a survivalist cult that’s camped out on the city’s war-torn outskirts. Ess happens on a box of old diaries—including Bea’s, in which she recorded multiple sightings of an angel. Meanwhile, Kay turns out to be related to Bea’s husband, Ade, and her work in a library leads her to a time portal. Eventually, the three women meet through time travel and, against a desolate wintry background, each marvels in her own way about the weird experience. The slow-moving plot builds to a frustrating anti-climax that elides action in favor of more reflection. The specter of climate catastrophe adds some sense of urgency, but the narrative is weighed down by cumbersome backstories and an expansive cast of secondary characters. Though Dunnett admirably attempts to give each heroine a distinctive voice, the prose in each section underwhelms (Kay, who alone narrates in first person, observes at a party that “the music was incredibly loud. I felt incredibly intimate with it.”) This disappoints. (Apr.)