Isolde Penrose

Isolde Penrose has been the Cartographer's apprentice for five years. She has learned that some territories exist before they're mapped—the kind that are there regardless of whether anyone draws them, the kind that cartography documents but doesn't create. But she has also learned that some territories don't exist until they're drawn—the kind that the act of mapping calls into being, the kind that only hold their shape because someone is continuously depicting them. Her master has been mapping such a territory for twenty years. It only exists because he has been mapping it. If he stops drawing it, it will cease to exist—the terrain, the settlements, the people who live there, all of it will disappear because it was never there in the first place. It was made by the mapping, and it will be unmade when the mapping stops. Now he wants to stop. *The Cartographer's Apprentice* is fantasy about cartography, creation, and the question of what happens to a territory that only exists because someone has been drawing it. It follows Isolde through her apprenticeship as she learns the cartographer's methods, discovers the territory that her master has been calling into being for twenty years, and has to decide what happens when the mapping stops. The novel unfolds across four acts: The Apprenticeship (the cartographer's methods, the difference between documenting and creating, the particular craft of mapping things that don't exist until they're drawn); The Master's Territory (the place that only exists because he's been mapping it for twenty years, the settlements and people who will disappear if the drawing stops, the question of whether they were ever real); The Succession (what happens when her master can no longer maintain the territory, whether Isolde will take over the mapping, and what it costs to keep drawing something into existence); and The Choice (whether to continue the mapping, let the territory disappear, or find a third option that neither documents nor creates