People always ask writers where a book comes from, and we almost never tell the truth, because the truth is usually smaller and stranger than anyone expects. So here is mine.

The Waking Lands began with a map that would not hold still.

I was going through a box of my grandmother's things — the kind of box everyone seems to inherit eventually, full of buttons and postcards and the odd door key that no longer opens anything. Near the bottom there was a map, folded so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth. It showed a village that isn't there anymore. Not renamed, not rebuilt. Gone — under a reservoir, the way a surprising number of places quietly are. She had kept a map of somewhere you could no longer stand.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. What good is a map to a place that has vanished? And then, the thought that wouldn't leave: what if the map knew? What if it kept redrawing itself — not to show you the roads that exist, but the ones you've lost? Every home you've had to leave. Every person who used to be a door you could knock on.

That was the whole spark. A living map of vanished things. Everything else in the trilogy grew out from that one impossible object, the way frost grows across a window overnight — you don't see it happen, and then the whole pane is a country.

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters. I did not set out to write a sad book. Loss is in these pages, yes — you can't put "vanished" in the title and pretend otherwise. But the story that kept arriving on the page wasn't a lament. It was stubborn. It was a woman who refuses to accept that gone means gone. It's a dog who will not be left behind no matter how many times he's told to stay. It's a villain whose reasons you understand a little too well for comfort. It is, underneath everything, about the oldest human trick there is: the way we carry a place with us long after we can never return to it.

Because that's the thing I came to believe while writing it, and the line the whole trilogy leans on: you can never go home — but you can carry it. Home stops being a dot on a map you return to. It becomes a map you keep redrawing, for as long as you're walking.

A Map of Vanished Things is the first book in that world. I've spent a long time in the Waking Lands now, and the strangest, best part of finally letting the book out the door is knowing that other people are about to walk into it too — and that it will become, a little bit, theirs.

If you've ever kept something you couldn't quite explain — a key to no door, a photograph of a room that's gone, a map of a place that isn't there — then I think we already understand each other. I'd love for you to come and see where the map leads.

More soon. The Waking Lands are waking.

— Lena