In Tender Maps: Travels in Search of the Emotions of Place, Alice Maddicott asks: What do our physical surroundings truly mean for us? What is atmosphere, and why does it matter?

Tender Maps charts the feelings of place, its associations, and - in times of national borders and migration, climate crisis and an increasing disconnect from the lived environment - the need to reaffirm that emotion of place.

Combining literature (early map-making, books, land art, children's fables) and memoir (reflections on Alice's childhood home, being made homeless during the pandemic, finding a permanent home in the West Country), Tender Maps cuts to the heart of what the places we exist in meanfor all of us: more than as simply a passive background to our being they are something emotional, political and vital in our lives.

Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, or 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 relentless travelling, from
the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan. With her uniquely lyrical
approach to psycho-geography, Maddicott explores the relationship with
landscape that is the very essence of human creativity.

From seventeenth-century salons of Paris to the underground culture and
crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, through writers as diverse as Italo
Calvino and L. M. Montgomery and artists like Ana Mendieta and
eighteenth-century girls embroidering their lives, Tender Maps is
a beautifully evocative book of travel,
culture and imagination that transports readers in time and place.

'A rich and beguiling work of literary travel memoir that nimbly tracks the wider contours of the world
in terms of feeling, memory, introspection and the imagination.' - Travis Elborough,
author of Atlas of Vanishing Places