The Cartographer of Lost Winds

When Iris inherits her grandmother's collection of hand-drawn maps, she expects faded paper and nostalgic curiosity. What she finds instead upends everything she thought she knew about her family — and about the nature of memory itself.

These maps don't chart physical places. They trace the geography of moments: a first kiss under a willow tree in 1952, the exact coordinates of a heartbreak, the topography of a lie that lasted sixty years. As Iris follows the trails her grandmother left behind, she discovers some memories aren't meant to be revisited — and others aren't her grandmother's to keep.

Set between contemporary Toronto and postwar Europe, The Cartographer of Lost Winds is a luminous debut about the stories we inherit, the secrets we guard, and the maps we draw to find our way home. Elena Vance writes with the precision of a surveyor and the tenderness of someone who knows that the most important landscapes are the ones we carry within us.