Mental Health

In her twenties and struggling to find her place in the world, Frankie retreats from urban life to her late grandmother’s empty house in the Irish countryside. An aspiring artist, she feels increasingly disconnected from her ambitions, her relationships, and herself. Surrounded by fields, abandoned objects, and the quiet presence of wild animals, she begins photographing dead creatures she encounters along her walks, turning these unsettling discoveries into an attempt to make sense of life and death. As Frankie observes the landscape and revisits memories of her past, the ordinary details of rural existence become a way to examine grief, anxiety, and the uncertainty of adulthood. A Line Made by Walking is a contemplative novel about the fragile process of recovery and the difficulty of finding meaning when familiar ideas about success and happiness no longer seem convincing. With her characteristic attention to nature and overlooked details, Baume explores the uneasy relationship between artistic ambition, emotional vulnerability, and the desire to begin again.

In Cork, Ireland, a derelict Victorian psychiatric hospital is being transformed into modern apartments. For one woman, known as the Reader, the abandoned building becomes the beginning of an extraordinary investigation into the lives of the women who once lived behind its walls. Through archival records and the casebooks of Dr Lucia Strangman, one of Ireland’s earliest female asylum doctors, she discovers the stories of women whose suffering was recorded, interpreted, and too often misunderstood by the medical establishment. As the Reader becomes increasingly immersed in their histories, the boundaries between past and present, personal experience and historical memory begin to blur. Blending biography, memoir, historical research, and elements of the ghost story, Said the Dead gives imaginative life to forgotten women while examining grief, mental illness, motherhood, and the ethics of recovering voices that history has silenced.