Modern Odyssey Books – förlag

"There is brilliant writing, as human frailties and deceptions are analyzed, traced, and observed. The characters are fleshed out with deft precision and economy - indeed, the novella itself is sharp and taut and a pleasure to read. If literary fiction can ever be described as a page-turner, this is it." - The Madrid Review

Nine people. One conference room. Too many lies.

A literary mystery about the secrets we keep - and the performances we perfect.

On a snow-covered Monday morning, nine colleagues file into a glass conference room, preparing for another ordinary corporate week. But what begins as routine quickly spirals into quiet chaos, as betrayals and strange silences threaten to expose one person's most dangerous secret.

Each person hides something. Some lies are small. Some are strategic. But one deception could unravel everything.

Told through shifting perspectives and layered with fragments of art, philosophy, and observation, Biography of Deception is a haunting novella about identity, truth, and the fictions we live by.

Marshall has created something remarkable. Writing with intellectual lucidity, carving out her narrative in spare, elegant prose, she elicits an almost visceral emotional response...An excoriatingly, triumphantly, honest new voice.

- Anna Beer, Eve Bites Back and Death of an Englishman

The deft writing and often confessional tone make it startlingly, deliciously personal yet the changes of pace and point of view, sometimes into fiction, sometimes into brief word bites or prose images, save it from being a typical memoir...This is a sown quilt of memories and sensations laid out for us, or perhaps over us...This has the makings of a cult classic.

- James Hartley, The Madrid Review

* * *

Life journeys us, whether we want it to or not. But it's up to us what we do with those unexpected and sometimes startling pivots.

The essays and stories in A Line Drawn or Printed trace the physical and emotional journeying of a woman who moves from the UK to Madrid in midlife, seeking reinvention, adventure and meaning.

Against the backdrop of the sensuous Spanish capital and following the soft hum of commuter trains, the book maps the city through themes of love, the body, leave-taking, cities and choosing to be other.

With poetic precision and disarming honesty, the essays explore how places and events etch themselves into our identity - and how meaning is often found not in an endpoint, but in the act of moving through.