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Line by Line: Nina Allan
For readers drawn to fiction that slips the seams of genre, and lands somewhere closer to memory.
Nina Allan is one of those rare writers who resists categorisation, but not connection. Her fiction unfolds with quiet precision — speculative in structure, literary in voice, and deeply human at its core. Whether set in parallel realities or the recesses of memory, her stories ask difficult questions:
What happens when truth fractures? When timelines blur? When the past comes back, but not quite how you remembered it?
For readers drawn to the liminal — to fiction that sits between the imagined and the intimate — Allan offers a body of work that’s as haunting as it is honest.
The Rift
Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel, The Rift begins with a vanishing and ends somewhere entirely unexpected. When seventeen-year-old Julie disappears, her family is left with grief and silence — until, twenty years later, she returns with a story that defies logic. Allan threads speculative unreality through the emotional truths of grief and trust, never losing sight of the ache beneath the mystery.
“A piercing meditation on loss and the limits of certainty.”
The Dollmaker
A quietly unsettling love story — and a meditation on storytelling itself. Andrew and Bramber are two doll collectors exchanging letters across the country. As their pasts unfold and narrative boundaries blur, Allan crafts a subtle metafiction about longing, trauma, and the strange stories we tell to make sense of ourselves.
“The Dollmaker is an atmospheric novel which questions how we see ourselves and what we are willing to do to free ourselves.”
The Race
Allan’s debut novel, shortlisted for both the BSFA and Kitschies Golden Tentacle awards, blends ecological collapse, dog racing, and fractured narrative into a speculative mosaic. Divided into four distinct but interwoven voices, it’s an ambitious, elliptical story that rewards readers willing to piece together its echoes.
The Race is a book about longing, and belonging. It’s a book about identity — how it’s formed for us, and how we go on to fit it to ourselves or else ourselves to it.
Conquest
Published by small press NewCon, Conquest is a quietly defiant novella about resistance, power, and the narratives used to shape control. Told in four distinct sections—memoir, interrogation, fable, and aftermath—Allan’s spare prose strikes with unusual clarity.
“Conquest is a haunting, thought-provoking speculative masterpiece, a riveting demonstration of an artist in masterful control of her material.”
Nina Allan’s work doesn’t just cross boundaries — it questions why they were drawn in the first place. Her stories live in the spaces between realism and unreality, empathy and abstraction. For readers who like their fiction layered, unsettling, and quietly revelatory, Allan offers a singular voice — one worth following, line by line.
You might also enjoy our recent guide to science fiction that challenges the mind as much as the imagination:
→ 10 Spellbinding Fantasy Novels to Escape Into This Spring (2025)
Until next time, happy reading.
— The Page Sage
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