By Lena Fenn
On the surface it is a fantasy adventure about a girl, a sea crossing and a land that will not hold still. Underneath, A Map of Vanished Things is the most personal book Lena Fenn has ever written. We asked her about leaving home, pining for it, and the hard, freeing truth that the place you left keeps moving without you.
A Map of Vanished Things is a fantasy adventure, but you've called it the most personal thing you've written. Why?
Lena: Because every rule of that world came out of my own life. I left the UK for Australia a long time ago, and for years I lived with one foot on each shore. My days happened here. My heart kept drifting back there.
When I started building the Waking Lands, I realised I wasn't really inventing a magic system at all. I was taking a feeling I'd carried for years and turning it into geography.
What was that feeling?
Lena: Being torn. You build a life in one place while part of you is always pining for another. You hear a certain accent in a shop and your chest goes tight. Then one day you notice you're still saying “back home” about somewhere you haven't lived for decades.
For a long time I thought the answer was to go back. I told myself that one day I'd return and everything would slot into place again.
And did it?
Lena: No, and that was the moment the book was born. Each time I went back, home had moved on. The shop on the corner had changed hands. Streets had new names on the doors. Children I remembered as babies were taller than me, and some of the people I most wanted to see were gone.
Nobody had done anything wrong. Life had simply carried on, as it should. The home I'd been pining for only existed in my head, frozen on the day I left. All the while I was busy missing it, the real place had been quietly walking away.
So you made a world where the land literally walks away.
Lena: Exactly that. In the Waking Lands the ground wanders. Rivers change their minds, villages drift, forests pull up and move a few miles in a generation. Nobody can return to the exact place they were born, because it isn't there any more. It hasn't been destroyed. It's just somewhere else.
Every migrant knows that truth. I just made it the physics of an entire world.
Across the sea from the Waking Lands lie the Sleeping Lands, where nothing ever moves. What do they represent?
Lena: The safe new country. On the Sleeping Lands the map you drew as a child still works when you're old, and that sounds like paradise. It's where Neve's family fled so their children would grow up on ground that could never wander off.
The Vaeli have an old saying about making that crossing: it is “to trade a heartbeat for a photograph.” Safety is real and precious, but land that cannot move is land that cannot live. I've felt both sides of that bargain.
Neve has never seen the homeland her family talks about. Why tell the story through her eyes?
Lena: Because children of migrants inherit the homesickness without ever having the home. Neve grows up on her grandmother's stories of a place she has never stood in, longing for it and resenting it in equal measure.
When her gift wakes and she's carried back across the sea, she becomes an immigrant in reverse, chasing adventure straight towards the family wound. She thinks she's running away from home. In fact she's running towards the question of what home even is.
Families in the book treasure hearth-maps of homes that no longer exist. Where did that come from?
Lena: Every family that has ever moved has one, even if it isn't on paper. A box of photographs, a recipe, the layout of a nan's kitchen you could still walk blindfold.
In the Waking Lands, any map older than a generation is useless for travel because the land has moved. It's priceless as memory, though. A stale map is a photograph of a world that's gone, and the Vaeli would never dream of selling one.
If you can never go back, how do you keep home at all?
Lena: You carry it. That's the whole book in three words. You keep home alive by talking about it: telling the stories, saying the names of the people and the places out loud, cooking the food, laughing at the same old jokes on the phone.
The Vaeli have turned that into law. They speak the names of vanished places so they don't die a second death. On Naming Night they light a lantern for every lost home and every beloved dead. Anyone crossing the sea takes a stone from their own doorstep, and every traveller's loaf gets a pinch of salt so the road tastes of coming back. All of those customs say one thing. Home isn't ground. Home is people and memory, and you take it with you.
The villains of the book want to stop the world moving. Are they really villains?
Lena: That's the question I wanted readers to wrestle with. The Anchorites can't bear the losing, so they want to freeze the land in place, and the dream they're selling is every migrant's dream: a home that stays exactly where you left it.
I wanted that promise to be so tempting that you half hope they succeed. The catch is that frozen ground greys and dies, with everyone still standing on it. A home that can never change is a home that can never live. They aren't evil. They're grief that couldn't let go.
Is it hard to write something so close to the bone under your own story?
Lena: It was healing, if anything. Neve isn't me, and the Waking Lands aren't anywhere you could find on a map. Still, every time she clutches that hearth-map, or feels the ground saying goodbye beneath her feet, there's a little of me in it.
Writing her journey helped me stop mourning the place I left and start carrying it properly. I talk about home more now than I ever did, and that has brought it closer than any plane ticket.
What's next for Neve?
Lena: Book Two, A Country of Held Breath, takes her further into the living shore and closer to the side of the family who stayed behind. The trilogy closes with A Home of Every Distance. I'll only say that the question of home gets bigger, and so does the cost of answering it.
What would you most like readers to take away?
Lena: Especially anyone who has left somewhere they loved: you haven't lost it. The place has moved on, as every living thing must, but the home inside you hasn't gone anywhere. Keep saying the names. Keep telling the stories.
You can never go home, but you can carry it. And as Neve's grandmother tells her, you are never off the map.
Find your way in
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Walk no seam alone. You are never off the map. Come home by your own name.