“In 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—a delight to read.”—Nathan Englander, author, kaddish.com
— Nathan Englander
“Varallo’s 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.”—Stephanie Powell Watts, author, No One is Coming to Save Us
— Stephanie Powell Watts
“With 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’t really know what they’re 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.”—Venita Blackburn, author, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
— Venita Blackburn
“I 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—a 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—loneliness, broken hearts, the shifting allegiances between siblings and parents, all of it set against the backdrop of an unsettled political era—resonates powerfully with our own.”—Christie Hodgen, author, Elegies for the Brokenhearted
— Christie Hodgen
STARRED REVIEW: Against the backdrop of the 1970s gasoline crisis, members of a mid-Atlantic family identified only as the father, the mother, the boy, and the girl struggle with separation and its attendant fears in this debut novel. "When things separate, they double," the kids discover after their distant father moves into his own apartment and, soon enough, begins sharing it with a waitress from a local restaurant. Suddenly, the boy and girl have two homes, two mother figures, and two beds. (The boy, exceptionally bright for a 7-year-old, thinks he dreams differently in the full-size than in the twin.) When their overwhelmed mother becomes involved with a drab man named Cliff, the boy and his nearly 10-year-old sister have Marcus, Cliff's spouting-off adolescent son, to contend with. Quietly unsettling details accrue: The sleepless girl hears repetitions of “how? how? how?” in her brother's oscillating room fan; the boy hears car crashes outside his bedroom window a year after two teens in the area died in an accident; the children's margarita-drinking Florida grandmother tosses off casually hurtful remarks. A master of narrative control, Varallo (Everyone Was There, 2017, etc.) creates the kind of page-turning suspense you don't expect in a book like this. Potential dangers abound: the creepy guy on the bicycle the girl keeps spotting; the gas-powered mower the boy teaches himself to use, on his own; Marcus' fondness for setting things on fire. The resilient children will emerge wiser and stronger from their ordeals. That likely won't be the case with their misguided parents, who don't know how to stop running on empty. A darkly cutting investigation of dysfunction in which the kids, more often than not, are way sharper than the parents.
— KIRKUS Reviews
“An 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.”—Midwest Book Review
— Midwest Book Review
"Subtle and melancholy, The Lines is a story about family dynamics, the ripple effects of separation, and the poignant and curious elements of an era."
— Foreword Reviews
"The Lines is one of those rare books where I’m still thinking fondly (and a little worriedly) about the characters weeks after reading it. Anthony Varallo is one of the best fiction writers anywhere: he has an almost miraculous comic eye, and his stories have enormous heart. I’ve read every book he’s published so far, and will keep reading them as long as he is willing to write them."
— Christine Sneed
