Lines and Shadows

by Sarah Bower

1960. The height of the Cold War. Maths prodigy Ginny Matlock is appointed to be the first woman computer at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the East Anglian coast. She quickly finds, in this landscape of endless skies and shifting shorelines, that nothing is what it seems. What is the terrible secret of Briar Cottage? What dark tale haunts the local pub? And who is the mysterious Artist with whom Ginny's fate becomes entangled? As the Berlin Wall rises and nuclear Armageddon threatens in Cuba, can Ginny build a life for herself among so many mysteries or will the terrors of the age suck her under?

Sarah Bower's brilliant novella blows the spy thriller genre to pieces and creates a feminist masterpiece from what is left of the rubble. A swirling mystery in which mathematical proof is always just out of reach. Lines and Shadows is the strange lovechild between Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent and John Le Carre.

148 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2023

About the author

Sarah was born and brought up in Yorkshire but now lives in Suffolk with her husband and two grown-up sons, not to mention the two golden retrievers, three chickens and an elderly, obese cat. She works for Creative Arts East, an arts development agency in Norfolk, managing projects to promote reading and creative writing. She also teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she completed a creative writing MA in 2002. She has published fiction and non-fiction in journals as various as MsLexia and British Industry. She was short-listed for the Curtis Brown scholarship at UEA in 2001/02 and has had success in a number of short story competitions, most recently as winner of the Café Writers Short Fiction Competition 2005.
Sarah has a weakness for lost causes and spends much of her leisure time watching England play cricket. Apart from being successful as a novelist, her biggest ambition is to spend a year travelling the world with the Barmy Army.

Reviews

[lornie · Rating 2 out of 5]

only really rating it a 2 as i thought the book was going in a different direction. found the book super atmospheric, loved feeling like i lived in the sleepy town, just wished it continued the gothic theme that it dabbled with

[Emma Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

The MC Ginny was so insufferable throughout, I could not enjoy her story or this book as a consequence.