Caleb Calder is a cartographer. While out cycling one day, he is hit by a car and suffers traumatic brain injuries. An outgrowth of this is that his ability to feel emotions is rewired in a way that allows the part of his brain he utilizes as a cartographer to become concatenated with the affective part. That is, he discovers that--borrowing from Descartes’s dictum—I map, therefore I am--that mapping is perception captured like an eddy in a stream in which each and every perception is a map of another map.Caleb is a man whose search for meaning hones in on the idea of querencia, a Spanish word that means: belonging to a place that nourishes you. It is on his journey to find such a place for himself and his young family that Caleb becomes enmeshed in a web of internecine intrigue that threatens to destroy everything he has worked for. In the end, he learns that no matter how the heart is mapped, it beats in rhythm to the touch of the land.
