Description

Cartography of Afternoons is a quiet, lyrical novel about memory, repair, and the maps that bind us to place.

When the narrator returns to their coastal hometown with boxes of documents to catalog, they find themselves working alongside Elias, a patient bookbinder tending to fragile, salt-stained maps in a chapel-turned-bindery. What begins as careful archival work soon unfolds into something deeper: a preservation of memory, a weaving of community, and a slow, tender intimacy built in the margins.

As outside pressures push for digitization and development, the maps themselves become contested ground—between erasure and remembrance, profit and stewardship. With the help of neighbors, the narrator and Elias transform the bindery into a living archive where stories, drawings, and memories are preserved not just on paper, but in the practice of care.

Cartography of Afternoons is for readers of literary fiction who savor atmosphere and subtle romance—an intimate coastal gothic where every act of mending is also an act of belonging.