tender maps: travels in search of the emotions of place

What do we mean by atmosphere?

Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, to see a city’s sights or a place of history. Others, like Alice Maddicott, travel in search of a particular scene, feeling or atmosphere, often inspired by music, literature and art. Taking us deep into our emotional and creative responses to place, this extraordinary book explores the author’s own relentless travelling. From the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan, this is a uniquely lyrical approach to psycho-geography.

As Maddicott explores this relationship with landscape that is the very essence of human creativity, she transports readers to seventeenth-century salons of Paris and the crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, in the company of writers and artists such as Italo Calvino and Ana Mendieta.

Tender Maps is a beautifully evocative book of travel, culture and imagination.

’A compelling way of looking at the world.’ The TLS

Alice Maddicott is a writer and artist from the West Country, where she also works on creative learning projects, currently for The Salisbury Museum. She has published poetry and received site-specific art commissions. Her first non-fiction book was the illustrated essay Cat Women: An Exploration of Feline Friendships and Lingering Superstitions.