Thin Bright Line

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an award-winning science writer and novelist for adults and children. Her many books include The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic, The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica, This Wild Silence, and Working Parts. A native of Portland, Oregon, she lives in Berkeley, California.

“Through her fictional reconstruction of the life of her namesake, her beloved aunt—who fought the good fight as a pioneering professional and a lesbian in unsympathetic times—Lucy Jane Bledsoe recreates an important piece of history and imagines what it was like to live it. A Thin Bright Line is poignant in both its conception and execution.”—Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution“This is gripping historical fiction about queer life at the height of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement, and its grounding in fact really makes it sing. Like the scientists whose papers she edits, Lucybelle Bledsoe is passionate about the truth. Whether it’s the climate history of the planet as illuminated by cores of polar ice, or the pursuit of an authentic emotional life in the miasma of McCarthyism, she operates with piercing honesty.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic“An engaging and moving novel about an unforgettable character. Bledsoe’s writing is intelligent, unadorned, and unsentimental, which allows us to look at a difficult time in American history with clarity instead of nostalgia.”—Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman.