The Cartographer’s Daughter — reading guide
Novel by Isabel Corran: the first pages, questions for reading groups and a word about the author.
About the book
Venice, 1790. A mapmaker’s daughter finishes her late father’s atlas and discovers a city that is not on any map.
The first pages
My father drew the lagoon every morning for forty years, and every morning it was different. The tide moved the sandbanks, the boats moved the mud, the city moved its bridges when no one was looking. When he died, he left me nine hundred sheets of the same water and one sheet of a place I had never seen: a small island, east of the Lido, with a church, a well and a name written in a hand I did not recognise.
For reading groups
- Can a map ever be finished?
- What does Chiara inherit from her father, besides the atlas?
- Would you have gone to the island?
About the author
Isabel Corran is a historian of maps in Edinburgh. She spent four winters in the archives of Venice writing this book.