Zeyn Joukhadar · 2018 · exile

Zeyn Joukhadar's 2018 debut, and the most literal answer this site has to what a map of a book looks like. A girl flees Homs with her mother and sisters across seven countries to Ceuta - retracing, in reverse, the route the twelfth-century mapmaker al-Idrisi took to chart the world.

1. 1
   Manhattan

   Nour is born and raised in New York to a cartographer mother and a bridge-designer father - and the summer he dies of cancer, in 2011, her mother takes the three sisters back to Syria.

2. 2
   Homs

   The family house, and a neighbourhood that is quiet for about a year - and then the protests, and then the shelling, and then a shell that takes the house down with Nour inside it.

3. 3
   Damascus

   South out of Homs with what they can carry - the first leg of a journey the book measures in countries, each part of the novel opening with a poem shaped like the border they are about to cross.

4. 4
   Zaatari

   The camp in northern Jordan, and the first of the places that is safety and is not home - Nour holding on to her father's story about Rawiya, a girl who crossed the same ground eight hundred years earlier.

5. 5
   Cairo

   Egypt, and the family splitting: Huda's arm worsens and their mother takes her to a hospital, sending Zahra and Nour on westward with a map painted on cloth.

6. 6
   Benghazi

   Libya, and the smugglers - the section where the novel stops being an adventure story, and where two girls are handed between people who are being paid by the head.

7. 7
   The Algerian coast

   Ashore after a crossing the book does not soften, and inland - a camel trek across the desert with Amazigh nomads, and after that a fruit truck driven west with the refrigeration running.

8. 8
   The Sahara

   The Algerian and Moroccan desert, and the stars Rawiya's mapmaker navigated by - the two journeys running along the same ground in opposite directions, eight centuries apart.

9. 9
   Ceuta

   The Spanish city on the African coast where Rawiya set out from, where Nour's parents once lived, and where an uncle is waiting - and where Nour decides that home is wherever her family happens to be.