Tender Maps

'Of

all the places where I feel the translucency of things, places that are thin

for me, bluebell woods are first among them.'

Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, or to see a

city's sights or a place of history. Others, like Alice Maddicott, travel in

search of a particular scene, feeling or atmosphere, often inspired by music,

literature and art. Taking us deep into our emotional and creative responses to

place, this extraordinary book explores the author's relentless travelling, from

the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan. With her uniquely lyrical

approach to psycho-geography, Maddicott explores the relationship with

landscape that is the very essence of human creativity.

From seventeenth-century salons of Paris to the underground culture and

crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, through writers as diverse as Italo

Calvino and L. M. Montgomery and artists like Ana Mendieta and

eighteenth-century girls embroidering their lives, Tender Maps is

a beautifully evocative book of travel,

culture and imagination that transports readers in time and place.

'A rich and beguiling work of literary travel memoir that nimbly tracks the wider contours of the world

in terms of feeling, memory, introspection and the imagination.' - Travis Elborough,

author of Atlas of Vanishing Places