A Cut Line

In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship.

She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. Physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish. Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence. Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine-always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing--undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

Carolina Pihelgas is an Estonian writer, poet, translator, and editor. Her collection of prose poems Valgus kivi sees (The Light within the Stone, 2019) received the Estonian Cultural Endowment Award for the best poetry book of the year. In 2020, she was appointed Tartu’s City Writer Laureate. The author of seven collections of poetry published her first novel Vaadates ööd (Watching the Night) in 2022. The short novel A Cut Line is her second work of prose and her first work to be translated into English.

Darcy Hurford translates from Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian into English. Originally from England, she is now based in Belgium, where she has been working for around 12 years. She studied modern languages at the University of East Anglia and comparative literature at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote and Ellipse Magazine.