I hope you enjoyed this fantasy as an escapist story, but perhaps you also glimpsed something of the themes beneath as you read. Here's how the idea came into being.
I moved to Bath, England, in 2015 and discovered an antique map shop in a little pedestrianized street between the Royal Crescent and The Circus. I walked past it almost every day when I went to the café to write, and one day, I went in and bought some books. It sparked my research around cartography, maps, and the obsession that humans seem to have with finding our physical place in the world.
Bath can seem perfect at times, with its Roman Baths, medieval Abbey, Georgian architecture and tasteful shops and restaurants. I love living here, but the darker edge of my imagination invented a shadow side to the city, a place just off the edge of the map, and the Borderlands were born.
In November 2016, we visited Israel on a research trip for my ARKANE thriller, End of Days. Borders are a big deal in Israel, surrounded as it is by nations who want to destroy it, and split internally by occupied territory. When we traveled to the West Bank, through checkpoints that Palestinians couldn't cross, I began to think about what it meant to be born on the other side, to be locked into a certain place, unable to leave, to be left with the land no one wanted.
As I write this in 2017, borders and walls have become part of the international conversation. Refugees find themselves crossing borders, and perhaps some of them have wandered into the Borderlands, pushed over by those countries who don't welcome them.
Here in Europe, Brexit fills the news. I voted Remain, but at this point, it seems certain that the passport I hold as a European Citizen will be revoked. I won't be able to cross borders as easily as I have done for most of my adult life and the international landscape I value so much is gradually disappearing beneath rampant nationalism.
I haven't chosen to give up being European – that identity is being taken from me.
So perhaps this is, in fact, a political book, a way I can deal with the complicated and unsolvable problems of borders.
There are no answers, but there are always stories.
Places in the book
As usual with my fiction, I have set the story in real places and modeled the Borderland locations on reality too. You can see some of the pictures that inspired the story at Pinterest.com/jfpenn/map-of-shadows.
Bibliography
I read a lot of books as part of my research. Some of them include:
The Mapmakers' World - Marjo T. Nurminen
Maps: Their Untold Stories - Rose Mitchell & Andrew Janes
Collecting Antique Maps: An Introduction to the History of Cartography - Jonathan Potter
Great Maps: The World's Masterpieces Explored and Explained - Jerry Brotton
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps - Edward Brooke-Hitching
The Un-Discovered Islands - Malachy Tallack
Tragic Shores: A Memoir of Dark Travel - Thomas H. Cook
Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations - Olivier Le Carrer
You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination - Katharine Harmon