The Atlas Keeper: A Novel
About this ebook
Every life follows a path. Elsie has just found the map to hers.
Elsie Campbell’s life has stalled. Since her mother’s death five years ago, she’s lived in her sister’s basement in the same small town where she was born. She has no real friends, no romance and spends her days crunching data for her dad’s mapping firm. And now, as her sister marries, she’s about to lose her home.
The day after a solar eclipse, Elsie hikes to the lookout where her mother died. There she finds an atlas filled with maps and astrological charts that have the power to send her to twelve turning points in her life. In visiting the past, Elsie makes surprising discoveries about herself. But she can also visit the future—which leads to unexpected consequences.
When the atlas leads her both back to her old boyfriend and toward a new love, Elsie finds herself at a crossroads where she must choose between a familiar and nostalgic road or an uncharted path. Can she really change the course of her life? And should she?
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About the author
GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ ’s first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the UK’s Betty Trask Award, the BC Book Prize for Fiction and the Vancity Book Prize. Her second novel, A Recipe for Bees, was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Spawning Grounds was nominated for the Sunburst Award and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award and shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for fiction. Her thriller, The Almost Wife, hit the Canadian bestseller lists in 2021, while her latest thriller, The Almost Widow, released in 2023, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada Howard Engel Award for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada. She taught for nearly a decade within the MFA program in creative writing at the University of British Columbia and lives in the Shuswap region of British Columbia.
