Set in the summer of 1979, when America was running out of gas, The Lines tells the story of a family of four鈥攖he mother, the father, the girl, and the boy鈥攊n the first months of a marital separation. Through alternating perspectives, we follow the family as they explore new territory, new living arrangements, and new complications. The mother returns to school. The father moves into an apartment. The girl squares off with her mother, while the boy struggles to make sense of the world. The Lines explores the way we are all tied to one another, and how all experience offers the possibility of love and connection as much as loss and change.
鈥淎 darkly cutting investigation of dysfunction in which the kids, more often than not, are way sharper than the parents.鈥濃Kirkus starred review
鈥淰arallo鈥檚 attention to the music in the spare, lyrical voices of his characters is enough to put this novel on your must-read list. What he manages to create in the story of divorce in an ordinary family is a tale about grief, alienation, and ultimately compassion itself. Riveting.鈥濃擲tephanie Powell Watts, author, No One is Coming to Save Us
鈥泪苍&苍产蝉辫;The Lines, a family reckons with divorce against the backdrop of the fuel crisis of the 1970s. Anthony Varallo renders this story vividly and tenderly and with great nuance. The Lines is moving and elegiac鈥攁 delight to read.鈥濃擭athan Englander, author, kaddish.com
鈥淎n intimate, often humorous, and phenomenally insightful novel about the way children experience separation and divorce. Anthony Varallo鈥檚 The Lines is one of the most moving portraits of a broken family I鈥檝e read since Judith Guest鈥檚 Ordinary People.鈥鈥Patrick Ryan, author, The Dream Life of Astronauts
鈥淲ith charming language, familiar circumstances, and a taut narrative, this book evokes that point in time when every child suddenly realizes the adults around them don鈥檛 really know what they鈥檙e doing. That is the world we inherit, the world Varallo permits us to turn over in our hands, landmarked with curious relics of Americana wholly worth the gaze.鈥濃擵enita Blackburn, author, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
鈥淚 was dizzy when I put down this book, having been transported so convincingly to the kind of life we lived before the internet, before cell phones鈥攁 time when lovers and family members floated outside our immediate grasp, when we sometimes fumbled to reach them. And yet there is something timeless here, too. The territory this family navigates鈥攍oneliness, broken hearts, the shifting allegiances between siblings and parents, all of it set against the backdrop of an unsettled political era鈥攔esonates powerfully with our own.鈥濃擟hristie Hodgen, author, Elegies for the Brokenhearted
鈥淎n erudite, insightful, multilayered and compelling novel from first page to last, The Lines is unreservedly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections.鈥濃擬idwest Book Review
