For Book Clubs
For Book Clubs
The Cartography of What Remains — free copies for your whole group, a discussion guide, and an author who answers questions in writing.
No cost, no obligation, and nothing asked in return.
The book, briefly
Since Tomas died, Lena has kept her life small enough to survive: the chipped cup on the left of the sink, the bread folded twice, the keys in the bowl by the door. She has also found she can step back into the kitchen they shared and stand inside one fixed afternoon — not remember it, physically stand in it, close enough to count the threads at his cuff — watching her younger self refuse the coffee, the bread, the man across the table.
She goes back to gather evidence. Nothing there can be changed. And each return wears the memory thinner: the edges go first, the jars on the shelf, the calendar by the fridge, the street beyond the window, while the centre stays unbearably clear.
Literary fiction with one impossible rule. Quiet, and short.
What a club needs to know
- Length
- 47,334 words. A short novel, about three and a half to four hours’ reading.
- Chapters
- 15, evenly weighted. Splits cleanly at Chapter 8 for a two-session club.
- Format
- Kindle ebook. Free copies for every member, epub or PDF, whichever each reader prefers.
- Paperback and hardcover editions exist but are not on general sale yet. This is a digital read for now.
- Author participation
- Written Q&A only. No video calls, no phone calls, no live sessions.
- Turnaround
- Questions answered in writing within a week, ready to read aloud or circulate.
- Setting
- An unnamed canal city. Readers in the Low Countries tend to recognise it immediately.
- Language
- English, written in British English.
Content notes
Discussion guide
Twelve questions, in three movements. Use them, adapt them, or ignore them entirely.
Opening 1–4
- Lena keeps the chipped cup on the left of the sink with the chip turned towards the wall. On the last page she washes it and sets it down with the chip facing out. What has actually changed between those two gestures — and is it enough to count as an ending?
- She says she goes back ‘to gather evidence’. Evidence for a prosecution, or evidence for a defence? Who is standing trial in that kitchen, and who appointed the judge?
- The going-back has two rules. Nothing there can be changed. And every return wears the memory thinner — the shelf above the radiator goes, then the calendar, then the street beyond the window, while Tomas’s face stays clean. If your own memories were spendable like that, would you still go? How often?
- The city is never named. Did that make it feel more real to you or less? Did you place it somewhere anyway — and if so, where, and what put it there?
The argument 5–9
- ‘Later had been their most used promise by then.’ Later for the form, the market, the leaking tap, the walk while the evenings still held light. Is ‘later’ a cruelty, or is it just what ordinary tiredness sounds like? Does the book let Lena off, and should it?
- Tomas’s carefulness — receipts under magnets, keys returned to the blue dish, cups dried with space around them — annoyed Lena when he was alive and is unbearable to her now. Why is care so often only legible after the fact? Is there someone whose care you are currently failing to read?
- Halfway through, Lena finds the folded bus ticket in his coat: a hospital appointment for chest pain that he never told her about. Does that change the ledger? Does it make her failure smaller, or only differently shaped?
- Noor, describing her mother, refuses to draw a moral: ‘She did not make the dead child useful.’ The novel does the same thing — it never converts Lena’s grief into a lesson. Did you want it to? Is a book that refuses to console you being honest, or withholding?
- Three living people keep offering Lena something: Mrs Smit’s blunt neighbourliness, Pieter’s dry kindness, Noor’s silence that doesn’t need filling. Which offer is hardest for her to take, and why that one?
Closing 10–12
- Near the end Lena realises that not going back could become its own ritual — ‘another court, another room’, a discipline she could be proud of. Is her final state recovery, or is it a truce? Does the distinction matter to her? To you?
- ‘The present was not a reward. It was only where consequence continued to happen.’ Is that a bleak sentence or a hopeful one? The group will split on this; find out where the line falls.
- The book ends without ceremony: ‘She could go back… She did not.’ No scene, no speech, no forgiveness. Was that the right ending — and if you’d have written one more page, what would have been on it?
Download the discussion guide (PDF)The guide, the content notes and the practical facts on two sides of A4. This page prints cleanly too.
Author Q&A
Six questions answered ahead of time, so your club has them whether or not you send any of your own.
Where did the going-back come from?
From the ordinary version of it. Everyone replays a last conversation. I wanted to know what would happen if that replay were literal and physically present — if you could stand in the room and smell the coffee and still be unable to move a single thing. The fantasy of going back is usually a fantasy of repair. I was interested in the version with the repair taken out.
Why does the memory wear thin?
Because otherwise there is no story, only a situation. If Lena could return infinitely at no cost, she would, and the book would be a loop. The thinning makes it a transaction: every visit buys another look at his face and spends something she can’t get back. It also happens to be true of real memory — the more often you handle a recollection, the more it becomes a recollection of the last time you handled it. I only made that visible.
Why is the city never named?
Because naming it would have invited the reader to check my facts instead of Lena’s. The city needed to be exact in texture and unlocatable on a map. That said, it is not neutral — it has canals, bicycles, gulls, brick that holds a bakery smell, and houses that lean towards the water. Readers in the Netherlands generally stop asking after about two pages.
Is Tomas a good man, or is that just grief talking?
Both, and the book keeps them in the same frame on purpose. Lena spends most of the novel needing him to be either gentle, so she can be the one who failed, or flawed, so the failure can be shared. What she eventually sees is a man with edges — someone who knew exactly when not to ask her a question, which is a skill, not a softness. And who hid a hospital appointment. Care and harm sit in the same room and neither cancels the other.
It’s short. Was that deliberate?
Very. The book is about a woman shrinking her life down until it can be carried, and a 500-page version would have been a contradiction. It’s a single afternoon examined from fifteen angles. Anything I couldn’t get into a sentence, I cut.
What should we read next if we liked this?
Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World for the unreliable self-accounting, Claire Keegan’s Foster for the compression, Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers for the other route through the same material. And if the club wants to stay in this world, there are four more standalone novels in The Going Back Series — same city, different lives, no reading order.
What your club gets
- Free copies for every member — epub or PDF, no obligation to buy, review, post or reply.
- This discussion guide, free to use, adapt or ignore.
- A written Q&A: send your club’s questions after the meeting and I’ll answer them within a week, in writing, for the group to keep.
- Nothing asked in return. Not a review, not a rating, not a mention. If your club reads it and hates it, I would honestly rather hear that than nothing.
What I can’t offer: video calls, phone calls, live sessions, or posted physical copies.
Request copies
Prefer to help yourself? The copies are also available through StoryOrigin (eva.schep.eu/arc-readers) and BookSprout (eva.schep.eu/booksprout-arc-readers). One organiser signing up and forwarding the link to the group works better than eight people signing up individually.
Or write to me directly: eva@schep.eu