The Cartographers

One of the most original books I’ve read in a long while, and one that brings up fascinating questions about the relationship between maps and the places they depict. From the beginning of their studies at the University of Wisconsin, the friends who call themselves the Cartographers live to make maps come alive. After grad school, they begin work on The Dreamer’s Atlas, which will feature “fantastical recreations of real places, and…realistic ones of imaginary places”—for example, the magic-tinged maps from Lord of the Rings will be made to look real and actual places will be given the fantasy treatment. The work is soon abandoned and the friends’ lives take a very wrong turn when they become obsessed with something outside the atlas. Move forward twenty-something years and Nell, daughter of two of the Cartographers, is struggling in a job she hates after being fired years before from the map division at New York Public Library by her father, a legendary archivist there. She and her father haven’t been in touch in all those years, but she’s forced back to the library when he’s found dead at his desk, starting a series of very odd happenings that Nell must get to the bottom of if she doesn’t want to be murdered next. The library crimes here, while shocking, take a welcome back seat to the Cartographers gripping adventure, as Shepherd (The Book of M) lays bare how reality and wishes, passion and pain can coexist and become explosive. For fans of Zakiya Dalila Harris’ The Other Black Girl, which also swerves into unexpected waters.