The Cartography of Small Things book cover

Short Fiction

The Cartography of Small Things

Stories

2020 · 256 pages · Meridian Press

Eleven stories. Eleven ways to be lost.

A debut collection of eleven stories that map the interior landscapes of ordinary lives — a night-shift nurse who befriends a stranger, a father who cannot say goodbye, a woman who finds a box of photographs in a house that isn't hers. Precise, tender, and quietly devastating, these stories announce a major new voice in British fiction.

✦BBC National Short Story Award — Shortlisted
✦Edge Hill Short Story Prize — Winner

Reading Sample

She found the photographs on a Tuesday, which seemed wrong somehow. Discoveries like this should happen on Sundays, or in the blue hour before dawn — not on a Tuesday afternoon with the radio on and a cup of tea going cold on the windowsill.

There were forty-three of them, loose in a shoebox that had been wedged behind the boiler. She counted twice. Forty-three photographs of a family she had never seen, in a house she had lived in for eleven years.

— from The Cartography of Small Things