The Cartography of What Remains
Two years after her partner’s death, Lena has made her life manageable: the chipped cup on the left side of the sink, the bread folded twice in its bag, the keys in the bowl by the door.
The Book
The Cartography of What Remains
“A life could be held together by objects if the hands moved correctly among them.”
Two years after her partner’s death, Lena has made her life manageable: the chipped cup on the left side of the sink, the bread folded twice in its bag, the keys in the bowl by the door. She restores damaged photographs at an Amsterdam archive and labels what cannot be known, date unknown, man unknown, life unknown.
Then she discovers she can go back. Not remember, return. Stand in the old kitchen. Watch Tomas ask her a question she didn’t hear the first time. But memory is not a room, it is a map drawn in pencil: every visit erases a detail of him, and Lena is running out. A short novel about grief, the archives we make of the people we love, and the harder journey, the one back to the living.
- Series
- Book 1 of The Going Back Series
- Publishes
- 25 August 2026
- Language
- English
- Formats
- Kindle ebook · Paperback · Hardcover
- ISBN-13 · Paperback
- 9798181912144
- ISBN-13 · Hardcover
- 9798185280812
- Pages
- 248
- Publisher
- Independently published
Journal
The preorder for The Cartography of What Remains is open
The Cartography of What Remains is now available to preorder ahead of its publication on 25 August 2026.
Read →The book is with its first readers
The Cartography of What Remains is out of my hands and into a few others. A note from the middle of the waiting.
Read →About
Eva Schep writes about the spaces between people — and the ones left behind when someone is gone.
The fiction lives where the literary and the quietly impossible meet, circling a single stubborn question: what do we owe the version of ourselves that remembers? These stories trade in the unreliable comfort of memory, the weight of ordinary objects — a chipped cup, a borrowed screwdriver, bread on a plate — and the small Amsterdam rooms where lives quietly come apart and, sometimes, begin again.
The Cartography of What Remains is the first short novel in The Going Back Series, coming August 2026.
— Eva