1960. The height of the Cold War. Maths prodigy Ginny Matlock is appointed to be the first woman computer at a secretive nuclear testing facility off the East Anglian coast. She quickly finds, in this landscape of endless skies and shifting shorelines, that nothing is what it seems. What is the terrible secret of Briar Cottage? What dark tale haunts the local pub? And who is the mysterious Artist with whom Ginny’s fate becomes entangled? As the Berlin Wall rises and nuclear Armageddon threatens in Cuba, can Ginny build a life for herself among so many mysteries or will the terrors of the age suck her under?

Sarah Bower’s brilliant novella blows the spy thriller genre to pieces and creates a feminist masterpiece from what is left of the rubble. A swirling mystery in which mathematical proof is always just out of reach. Lines and Shadows is the strange lovechild between Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent and John Le Carre.