Description:
10th July 2025
6.30 to 9pm
Join us for a panel discussion to celebrate two outstanding debuts, A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett and Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal, that both engage brilliantly with climate and societal instability. The panel will be chaired by Suzi Feay.
A Line you have Traced is published by Magpie Books on the 10th of April 2025
In a silverware shop in interwar East London, a young wife works alongside her husband. Amid growing political turmoil, Bea finds solace in the local marsh, where she is visited by a mysterious presence. She logs each appearance carefully in a scarlet journal.
In a time like now, Kay navigates friendship, queerness and the temporary job market, whilst contemplating the significance of her life in a world with such an uncertain future.
At her grandmothers house she finds an intriguing record of an angels visits.
A hundred years into the future, outsiders have banded together to live off-grid away from a corrupt government and a city wracked by oppression and climate change. When Ess is chosen for a virgin mission, a journey into the past to save the present, she is guided only by a well-thumbed red notebook
Roisin Dunnett is a writer from London. Her fiction pamphlet Animal, Vegetable was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. Her short fiction has been published in Prototype, Hotel, Ambit, Vittles and elsewhere. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths where she was longlisted for the Pat Kavanagh Prize in 2022. She lives in Walthamstow, a stones throw away from the marshes that form a crucial backdrop to this book, her debut novel.
Saraswati is published by Serpents Tail on the 12th of June 2025
Centuries ago, the myths say, the holy river Saraswati flowed through Northern India. But when Satnam arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmothers funeral, he is astonished to find water in the long-dry well behind her house. The discovery sets in motion a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river and build a gleaming new city on its banks, and Satnam adrift from his job, girlfriend and flat back in London soon finds himself swept up in this ferment of Hindu nationalist pride.
As the river alters Satnams course, so it reveals buried ties to six distant relatives scattered across the globe from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double who are brought together in a rapidly changing India. Absorbing, moving and brimming with stories of love, lust, violence and loss, shifting seamlessly between the past and a boldly imagined near-future, Gurnaik Johals magisterial debut deftly animates the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands and each other.
Gurnaik Johals short story collection, We Move, won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Tata Literature Live! Prize and the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2022. Saraswati is his first novel.
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