She can go back. Not in memory. In fact.

Since Tomas died, Lena has made her life small enough to survive. The chipped cup on the left side of the sink. The bread folded twice. The keys in the bowl by the door.

And one impossible thing her grief allows.

She can step into the kitchen they shared and stand in the fixed afternoon light — close enough to count the threads at his cuff — watching her younger self refuse the coffee, the bread, the man across the table.

She goes back to gather evidence. Of his care. Of her failures. Of the small, ordinary cruelties that filled the last rooms of a love before a phone call ended it.

But the past keeps itself intact by making her harmless. Nothing she does there can be undone, or repaired, or forgiven.

And while she returns again and again to a room she cannot change, the present goes on without her — a stubborn downstairs neighbour, a colleague’s dry kindness, a woman who mends broken frames. Quiet edges, accumulating. Waiting to be lost by neglect as easily as the dead are lost by too much remembering.

My Review

I usually read crime, serial killer thrillers, and modern contemporary Gothic. I write crime, dark humour and magical realism. The Cartography of What Remains is not my usual genre, but I know I need to broaden my horizons (so long as it’s not sci-fi, high fantasy or horror).

Lena is widowed (though they weren’t actually married). She’s still young. Tomas died young. Every day she goes back and relives that last day, the chipped cup. the coffee, the bread, the forms that needed signing. Did she do something wrong? I can feel the guilt washing off her like the rain outside on her coat. It’s impossible for her to move forward until she can let go of the past.

In the meantime, Mrs Smit downstairs brings her home made soup. Pieter at the archive where they both work is rather annoying, but he’s trying to help in his own way. And then there is Noor who mends things. She offers to mend the broken frame of the office chair. Her workshop with the blue door is close by. Lena walks by but can’t allow herself to be friends.

It’s an emotional read which will stay with me for a long time. I am looking forward to book two in the series.

Many thanks to the author for an advance copy of the book.

About the Author

Eva Schep writes about the spaces between people — and the ones left behind when someone is gone.

The fiction lives where the literary and the quietly impossible meet, circling a single stubborn question: what do we owe the version of ourselves that remembers? These stories trade in the unreliable comfort of memory, the weight of ordinary objects — a chipped cup, a borrowed screwdriver, bread on a plate — and the small Amsterdam rooms where lives quietly come apart and, sometimes, begin again.

The Cartography of What Remains is the first short novel in The Going Back Series, coming August 2026.

Connect with Eva
Twitter/X: @Eva_Love_Story
Instagram: @author_eva_schep