The Cut Line 🌿

By Carolina Pihelgas.

The Cut Line is a quiet and unsettling book that drifts between emotional honesty and an almost dreamlike sense of detachment. It follows Liine as she seeks refuge in the Estonian countryside after ending a fourteen year abusive relationship.

What begins as escape slowly becomes a period of reckoning. She is alone with her thoughts, her memories and the heavy silence of a summer marked by drought, heat and the constant rumble of military exercises near the Russian border.

The book captures each stage of separation with striking clarity. Liine battles fear, guilt and the crushing weight of self doubt, all while her former partner continues to threaten and her family fails to understand her decision.

Yet there is something grounding in the physical work she throws herself into. Chopping wood, tending the soil, sowing seeds and caring for the land allow her to reconnect with her body and her strength. As summer unfolds she moves at the same pace as the natural world and finds a rhythm that slowly steadies her.

Alongside this recovery is a thoughtful exploration of her relationship with her mother, which proves to be almost as damaging as the partnership she has fled. These moments add depth to the story as Liine recognises how far back her patterns of self blame and silence truly stretch.

Pihelgas writes with poetic restraint, allowing space for breath between her words. The atmosphere is thick with dread yet strangely soothing, filled with vivid descriptions of parched landscapes, quiet forests and the distant echo of explosions that remind the reader that Liine is healing in a world that is also under threat.

The sense of place is powerful and carries a touch of other worldliness that stays with you long after closing the book.

The Cut Line is a tender and beautifully observed story about leaving, rebuilding and discovering the quiet resilience that grows in solitude. It is sorrowful yet hopeful, heavy yet full of light. A beautifully crafted book that I would warmly recommend.

Thank you to Christine at World Editions for sending me a copy in time for publication day! The book is out now and available to purchase.

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