Mapping the Edge [Paperback]

Sarah Dunant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2005

Anna packs her bags one day without telling anyone where and why she is going - just that she'll be back soon. Her thoughts as she boards a plane, are that this journey will give her time to think about her life - as a woman hitting forty, a journalist and a single mother. She has no premonition that she will become a statistic in a missing person file. Left at home is Anna's beloved six-year-old daughter Lily, her gay friend Paul, who is surrogate father to Lily, and her eccentric best friend Estella. When Anna doesn't return, they make uneasy excuses until, as time passes, the mind-numbing possibility that Anna might not be coming back becomes terrifyingly real. And while those closest to her battle with their imaginations, Anna is on a dark journey - in one scenario Anna is on a ravishing, sexual adventure, on the other, much darker voyage, she is the victim of a stranger's dangerous sexual fantasy. In a masterpiece of emotionally intelligent and nerve-wracking suspense, Sarah Dunant takes us to the very edge.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sarah Dunant's Mapping the Edge explores the best of two worlds, offering readers a suspenseful, eerie plot and a delicately nuanced exploration of the kinds of prickly, challenging ideas that, sadly, usually lie outside the province of the traditional thriller.

When Anna decides to take an impromptu trip to Italy, she packs her bag, leaves her 6-year-old daughter, Lily, at home with close friends, and steps onto the plane. She's always been a woman of action, and her personal and professional lives have been filled to overflowing recently. So her friends Paul and Estella think nothing of the jaunt--it's a well-deserved break, a weekend for psychic refreshment, a brief step outside reality.

But a disappearance? When Anna fails to return, Paul and Estella make excuses, to themselves and to Lily. When the weekend stretches toward a week, the possibility of her permanent absence becomes hauntingly real. Dunant takes that absence and weaves together a pair of possible "explanations," playing out alternating scenarios of seduction (Anna in the throes of a disturbingly passionate, illicit affair) and abduction (Anna in the grasp of a stranger whose cordiality turns gradually to madness).

The narratives are both twinned and twinning, less separate alternative accounts than a dialogue, with moments, objects, and phrases that serve as uncanny mirrors between the two. Dunant is indeed a skilled mapmaker--her novel maps the edge of the self, its boundaries that so often go unquestioned. Anna's sojourn in Italy is an excavation of the threat of being defined by one's relationship to others and the temptation to redefine oneself beyond the restrictions of conventional expectation, no matter how seductive, how forceful, that convention. --Kelly Flynn --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

What happened to Anna Franklin? That's the question posed in Dunant's latest novel, detailing five days in the life of those close to an English journalist who heads off on a short holiday and doesn't return when she is expected. Waiting anxiously at home are Anna's six-year-old daughter, Lily; Lily's part-time surrogate father, Paul; and Estella, Anna's best friend and Lily's godmother, who has flown in from Amsterdam. Caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty, Anna's makeshift family lives from moment to moment, waiting for the phone to ring, the door to openDhoping beyond hope for a simple explanation of Anna's absence. Two parallel "what if" stories run the course of the novel, tangling the reader in a web of suspense and confusion. Is Anna depressed by Lily's growing independence and feeling a need to reconnect with the woman she used to be before she became a mother? Or is she the victim of a tragic obsession gone awry, kidnapped by a psychopath with no feelings of remorse? While either story could accurately explain Anna's disappearance, each version shows a different side of the missing woman and the motivations behind her sudden trip. The suspense is good enough to keep the pages turning and the secondary characters' reactions lend credibility to the plot line; however, the ambiguous conclusion reads more like a cop-out than a subtle send-off. Most interesting is the convincing portrayal of Anna's alternative family and their quietly unconventional 21st-century living arrangements. Though she is known as a writer of sophisticated thrillers (Transgressions; Under My Skin), Dunant here leans gracefully toward straight literary fiction. Agent, Claire Alexander at Aitken & Stone. (Feb. 23)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Virago (July 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844081761
• ISBN-13: 978-1844081769
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 7.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,132,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The author of the critically acclaimed Hannah Wolfe mystery series, Sarah Dunant is also well known in the United Kingdom for her work as a television host. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bedtime readers, beware -- but it's worth it., April 21, 2001

By 

P. A. Hogan (Providence RI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mapping the Edge: A Novel (Hardcover)

Anna Franklin's "strategy for revitalization" involves an impulsive trip to Florence, Italy where she expects to rendezvous with her recently acquired part-time lover. Anna goes missing, and back home in London, those closest to her -- Paul, loyal friend and surrogate father to Anna's daughter Lily, aged six, and Estella, her long-time best friend -- are becoming increasingly anxious, worried -- and puzzled. "Mapping the Edge" is both a suspense story and a study of relationships. As a suspense story, the author borrows a premise used so effectively in some of Hitchcock's films: The innocent caught in the web of the villain's machinations; the dupe ensnared by the duper. On another level, the book explores relationships: between women and men, women and women, men and men, adults and children, the victim and the victimizer. Author Dunant accomplishes all this by filling the reader's plate with a clever device: two scenarios of what might have happened to Anna. In this author's hands, it is done skillfully and entertainingly, and the resolutions are plausible. If you're a bedtime reader, expect a late night when the engaging mixture of a suspenseful plot and intriguing characters seduces you.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting premise not fully realized, December 5, 2004

By 

B. McEwan "yellokat" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mapping the Edge: A Novel (Paperback)

This novel has a very interesting structure in which two parallel plots are presented as a way of explaining the sudden absence of a young mother. Anna leaves on a short trip for Italy without telling her best friend and without giving a full explanation to the surrogate father of her child -- a gay man who is busy juggling the pieces of his own life in a way that is similar to Anna. The one difference is that Anna does not have a current love relationship, which according to one of the plot strands is the reason she went to Italy.

When she doesn't return as scheduled, Anna's best friend and the child's father end up caring for the kid and trying to decide what could have happened to Anna and at what point they should notify the authorities. Here the plot bogs down a bit, as the father, the friend, the child and the father's lover have a lot of interchange that is presumably supposed to be highly meaningful, but which I found a bit tiresome.

The portion of the book that moves along at a strong pace is the plot thread that posits a sinister reason for Anna's absence -- that she has been kidnapped by a serial killer who is searching for his great love. The suspense is very well developed in this section of the novel and comprises the primary reason that one would want to read this book.

Many people seem to enjoy Sarah Dunant more than I do. While I like her choice of story topics, I find that once I'm into her book she loses me along way. This is the second of her novels I've read (the other being The Birth of Venus) in which I find her attempts at meaningful dialogue do not, as I assume is intended, reveal the complexities of her characters. Rather, the dialogue seems to further obscure her characters' motivations and feelings, and I wonder if that may not be her intention after all.

In any case, Mapping the Edge is worth reading for its inventive structure, especially the artful way that Dunant creates interfaces between the two plot strands: both incorporate a souvenir horse sculpture that she is brining home to her daughter, for example. This will not be the best novel you'll read this year, but it is a cut above the usual fare.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This edge is razor-sharp, July 13, 2002

By 

lb136 "lb136" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mapping the Edge: A Novel (Paperback)

In "Mapping the Edge," Sarah Dunant's impressionistic thriller, Anna, a single mother with a seven-year-old daughter, takes a break from her life for a short trip to Italy on her own. When she does not return her friends, Estella and Paul--she the best friend, he a (gay) chum of Anna's--act as surrogate parents and rush to Anna's house to relieve the professional babysitter, who has to go home to her family, in caring for the daughter, Lily.

In alternating chapters we are given two possible explanations for Anna's failure to return (titled "Away," these are told in the third person) after which there is a chapter called "home," a first-person narrative related by Estella. This pattern repeats itself for the duration of the journey. Although Ms. Dunant does not specifically say so, perhaps the more sinister version of Anna's fate (she is being held against her will by a stalker) is imagined by Estella while the more romantic one (she has meet a lover and has simply decided to spend one more weekend with him) is imagined by Paul.

Regardless, the interwoven tales mesh smoothly, and the prose is lucidly clear. The characters are believable and somewhat sympathetic--even the stalker. It's a gripping read.