The Cartographer of Ash (Paperback or Softback)

Three weeks after her father dies, Mira opens the door of his study and walks into a country.

The country has seven cities, each demanding a different kind of attention. A guide called Kael walks beside her. He says little. He sees almost everything.

Mira is a cartographer. She has spent her career mapping what stays still. The Territories will ask her to map what doesn't.

What follows is a journey into an inherited grief, the kind that doesn't arrive with the event but accumulates slowly, ordinarily, in all the years before, until you realise the distance has become permanent. The soft refusals, the missed evenings, the small adaptive distances a child learns to keep without meaning to.

When Mira finally meets her father at the centre of the seven territories, what they say to one another is the conversation neither of them had been able to have while there was still time.

The Cartographer of Ash is a literary novel about cartography, inheritance, and the late discovery that some maps can only be drawn after you have walked through what you were trying to chart.