My debut essay collection was published on the 17th June 2025 by Modern Odyssey Books.
A Line Drawn or Printed: Six Routes Through Madrid, by Jayne Marshall
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.
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Praise for A Line Drawn or Printed:
As soon as I read A Line Drawn or Printed, I wanted to give the book to others – to those who feel they don’t belong, to those enduring heartbreak, to the survivors of others’ tragedies – because this remarkable book sees you, it understands you. It’s also very, very funny.
An excoriatingly, triumphantly, honest new voice.
-Anna Beer, author of Eve Bites Back and Death of an Englishman
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Available online at the Modern Odyssey website, at Secret Kingdoms and Parenthesis bookshops in Madrid, Bookhaus in Bristol (UK) and all independent bookshops by pre-order.
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That Which You So Problematically Want: Conversations with Desire
by Jayne Marshall
My second book, a further collection of stories and essays that, this time, interrogate desire in its many unruly forms: not only the desire we feel for another person, but also other kinds of longing – wanting to uproot your life, to create, or, often problematically, to chase something else distant from the norm, will be published by Ybernia in 2027.
