Bookshop Talk: Tender Maps

About this event

“Of all the places where I feel the translucency of things, places that are thin for me, bluebell woods are first among them.”

What do we mean when we talk about atmosphere?
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, Alice Maddicott joins us to discuss her new book, Tender Maps, exploring her 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, and a manifesto for the power of being in 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

The event will be followed by a book signing.