The Paper Coast

Naomi Palmer had not spoken to her mother in two years.

There had been no quarrel. There had been instead the slow drift of two adults who had stopped knowing what to say to each other after Naomi's father died, and who had let the silence accumulate without naming it. Amelia Palmer remained on the northern cape of Hokkaido, drawing the imaginary maps for which she was quietly admired. Naomi remained in San Francisco, authenticating other people's manuscripts. There would be time.

At 2:41 on an October morning, the consulate called.

In the ruin of her mother's studio, Naomi found a stone vault that the first responders had located. It contained sixty-two maps drawn over forty years in a private cipher. And a single working sheet, retrieved by a detective from the cliff grass at first light: a map of the coast outside the studio, drawn from the studio outward, its lower edge burned, a section between the headland and the cove left unfinished.

The cipher, when she read it, was not the cipher of an imaginary world. The map, when she examined it, was the only one her mother had drawn from inside.

The Paper Coast is a literary mystery about the maps our parents leave behind, the territories they hid inside them, and what a daughter does when she finds the lines they did not draw.