Featured Title · Meridian House

New Crime Scene Johnstone Cheruiyot

Every map lies. Hers told the truth. A debut collection tracing migration, memory, and the small griefs that migrate with us across continents.

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New Crime Scene

Johnstone Cheruiyot
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45°26′N 12°20′E — Venice

A route drawn in disappearing ink

A debut collection tracing migration, memory, and the small griefs that migrate with us across continents.

"A cartographer draws the world as it is. A daughter draws it as she needs it to be." — Ch. 4, New Crime Scene
  • GenreCrime
  • AuthorJohnstone Cheruiyot
  • eBook$2.00
  • Paperback$4.00
  • Hardcover, Signed$23.00
  • PublisherMeridian House

43°30′N 16°26′E — Split

An excerpt from the log

Chapter Four — The Uncertain Coast

The chart said open water. The sea said otherwise. I had learned, by then, that my father's maps were never wrong so much as early — as if he had drawn tomorrow's coastline a decade before the water agreed to move there. I throttled back and let the boat drift, and for a moment I understood why he'd never once, in twenty years, let anyone else hold the wheel through this stretch.

There was a name for what I was doing. It just wasn't cartography.

41°23′N 2°10′E — The Author

Johnstone Cheruiyot

Johnstone Cheruiyot spent eleven years restoring nautical charts before she wrote a word of fiction. New Crime Scene is her third novel, and Meridian House's flagship title this season.

"I wanted to write about the parts of a map that are technically lies — projections, blank spots, the places we draw with more confidence than we have."

— from an interview with The Marginalia Review

Marginalia

Notes left in other copies

★★★★★

"I read the last hundred pages standing up because I'd forgotten to sit back down. Voss writes water like she's afraid of it."

— A. Kariuki, Reader
★★★★★

"A family mystery that never once resorts to melodrama. The restraint is the point."

— The Marginalia Review
★★★★☆

"Slow in the way a tide is slow — you don't notice the pull until you're already out past the reef."

— N. Odhiambo, Bookseller

The Collection

Twenty titles, one press

Literary Mystery

The Cartographer's Daughter

Elena Voss

Every map lies. Hers told the truth.

From Ksh 9.99
Literary Fiction

Salt and Silence

Noor Abdullahi

A coastline keeps its own kind of quiet.

From Ksh 8.00
Poetry

The Weight of Small Birds

Priya Nair

Poems for the things that almost left.

From Ksh 6.99
Sci-Fi Thriller

Static and Bone

Marcus Reyes

The signal was never meant to answer back.

From Ksh 9.99
Family Drama

Everything We Buried

Adaeze Okonkwo

The garden remembers what the family won't say.

From Ksh 8.99
Literary Fiction

The Glassblower's Requiem

Henrik Solberg

He could shape anything but forgiveness.

From Ksh 10.99
Contemporary Fiction

Ash Wednesday, Every Day

Bianca Ferro

Some Lents don't end when the calendar says.

From Ksh 8.50
War Fiction

The Six-Hour War

Tomasz Baran

It only takes one afternoon to lose everything.

From Ksh 11.99
Essays

A Field Guide to Leaving

Wren Castellano

Essays on the art of going, and staying gone.

From Ksh 7.99
Theatre Mystery

The Understudy's Ghost

Odalys Marín

The show must go on. So must she.

From Ksh 9.50
Travel Fiction

Blue Hour in Marrakesh

Yasmin El-Sayed

The medina keeps its best stories for last.

From Ksh 9.99
Literary Fiction

The Taxonomy of Regret

Simone Achterberg

She catalogued everything except her own life.

From Ksh 10.50
Poetry

Copper Wire Prayers

Desmond Achebe

What the old radios still carry.

From Ksh 6.99
Climate Fiction

The Orchard at the End of the World

Freya Lindqvist

The last harvest is never the one you expect.

From Ksh 9.99
Blanditiis praesenti

Voluptates distincti

Excepteur dolorem fu

Mollit totam ratione

From Ksh 152.00