Description

No one hast ever left the Line, nor shalt thou. To do so wouldst dishonour the sacrifices of all those gone before.

No one hast ever left the Line, nor shalt thou. To do so wouldst mean thy family must pay your penance.

Thou mayst leave thy place in the Line but only once – when thou dost marry.

But thou can only move down the Line, never up. For that is how thou will know it is true love.

And because moving up would be skipping.
And that is the most important rule of all.

Thou Shalt Not Skip The Line.
Thou Shalt Not Skip The Line.

Willard, his mother and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless journey where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or you will lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willard’s mother dies and he finds an incomprehensible book hidden among her few belongings…

LINE pushes the boundaries of speculative, high-concept fiction. Deeply moving, it also touches on many of the pressing issues of our turbulent world: migration and the refugee criss, big data and the erosion of democracy, climate change, colonialism, economic exploitation, social conformity, and religious fanaticism.

Publisher Review

'An enthralling work of high imagination and storytelling flair.' - Donal Ryan 'Line is an extraordinary novel - gripping, unsettling, brilliant.' - Roddy Doyle 'A powerful, discomfiting fable of uncertainty and failure, poetically crafted, politically pointed, a Ballardian take on the near-now that shows us how fleeting our idea of absoluteness really is.' - June Caldwell 'Line is a modern parable of the most ambitious kind. A Grapes of Wrath for the age of digital capitalism.' - Ronan Hession 'Beautifully written, terrifyingly intelligent, shot through with poetry, political nous and a darkly comic sensibility. Queuing up for a loaf of sourdough will never feel quite the same again.' - Hilary Fannin 'Sharply funny and astute.' - Sarah Moss, Irish Times 'Reads like a lost pulp fiction classic.' - The Times 'A dystopian tale worth queuing up for... Bourke's world-building is epic.' - Independent 'Groundbreaking speculative fiction.' - Doug Johnstone, Big Issue