The Cartographer of Lost Things: A perfect holiday read

She maps places she will never return to. He rebuilds a place he refuses to leave. They are the same person running in opposite directions - and this is the summer they collide.Mara Calloway has spent ten years turning rootlessness into a career. As a travel journalist, she files beautiful dispatches from places she passes through and never stays. She tells herself this is freedom. It isn't. It's penance - for the mother she left behind, and the call she received standing in a Hanoi street market telling her she was too late.Daniel Sousa is rebuilding his late grandmother's coastal hotel on the Algarve cliffs, one room at a time, with his hands. He has been doing this for five years. He does not ask what he will do when it is finished. There are letters he hasn't opened. A legal summons he is not ready to face. A locked room at the end of the corridor he cannot yet enter.When Mara arrives at Farol House as a travel writer on assignment, she expects a story about restoration. She doesn't expect a man who sees through her the way other people see through windows. She doesn't expect to want to stay.But Mara's ex-boyfriend has written an article that could destroy Daniel's future - and Daniel doesn't know. And the closer Mara gets to the truth, the closer she gets to a reckoning she has been outrunning for a decade.The Cartographer of Lost Things is a novel about what we build in the place of what we've lost, the difference between moving and running, and the particular courage it takes to stop - and be found.For fans of Emily Henry, Hazel Prior, and Josie Silver. Best read somewhere warm, with the sound of the sea nearby.