Shop your next book

A Map of Everything

Buy Now

Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction

About the book
Anne’s sister, a bright and lovely teenager, sustains a traumatic brain injury after a near-fatal car accident. As a result, Anne and her siblings and parents are thrown into a decades-long struggle for belonging, deliverance and redemption — with surprising results. A Map of Everything intimately explores the fragile nature of family dynamics, revealing what is salvaged, what is lost, and what is gained after a tragedy hits home.

“inventive, searingly honest, gorgeously written.”
– Gayle Brandeis
“eloquent, moody and strangely poetic.”
– Michelle Tea
ART: Christa Donner

MUSIC & WORDS: singer-songwriter Steph Barrak; slam poet Tatyana Brown; singer-songwriter and guitarist Liz Chidester; musician Diana Chittester; writer, teacher and performer William Evans; musician Lora Faye; slam poet Janae Johnson; writer, artist and social entrepreneur Dasha Kelly; writer and actor Beth Lisick; folksinger Dalice Malice; songwriter and composer Derek Schmidt; band Sister Lip; singer-songwriter Sierra West; writer-performer Wonder Dave; slam poet Joy Young.

“Elizabeth Earley’s A Map of Everything is one of the most structurally inventive and emotionally remarkable books I’ve come across in quite a while. So many writers traffic in the sensationalism of event, while Earley wisely knows that this is only the start of the trouble—and that our hearts truly beat and bleed in the repercussions of events. It’s a book that reminds us who we are to each other and to ourselves, and it has a resilient beauty, and a confident and true voice rare in any novel, let alone a debut.”

– Rob Roberge, author of The Cost of Living

“The writing in A Map of Everything is beautiful. Never shying away from the difficult, and embracing the big emotions, Earley has given us a strong, graceful and finely-etched novel.”

– Leonard Chang, author of Crossings

“Inventive, searingly honest, gorgeously written, this book will both break and heal your heart. With A Map of Everything, Elizabeth Earley charts her own fresh and dazzling territory.”

– Gayle Brandeis, author of The Book of Dead Birds and Self Storage

“In A Map Of Everything, Elizabeth Earley has the eyesight to notice what we trample underfoot, the instinctual intelligence to know why we do the things we do, the heart to rise above obliterating darkness, and — from somewhere — the ability to write like a witch.”

– Peter Nichols, author of Voyage to the North Star, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award

“An exploration of love and tragedy, what we owe to others and what we owe to ourselves, A Map of Everything is eloquent, moody and strangely poetic.

– Michelle Tea, co-founder of Sister Spit, and author of The Chelsea Whistle and Valencia

“In a little over 300 pages, A Map of Everything somehow manages to be a novel about everything: surviving tragedy, love, despair, complex family relationships, identity, how to be a good person, how to live in a world full of contradictions and dangers that are as much internal as external. This is a remarkable debut novel. Read it and weep – with both joy and sadness.

– Christine Sneed, author of Little Known Facts and Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry

“A Map of Everything is a tender story of personal transformation, addiction, loss and memory. Elizabeth Earley is a welcome new voice to literature.”

– Ali Liebegott author of The IHOP Papers and Cha-Ching!

“Elizabeth Earley’s remarkable debut novel, A Map of Everything, deftly follows a family through the complicated trajectory of their lives after one devastating moment on a rain-soaked street. Anne, the youngest, “fifth born”, leads us over the intricate roads of this map, telling stories along the way of June, her beloved, injured sister, and of her siblings and parents. Bold and deeply wounded, Anne is unflinching in her role as narrator and chronicler; we lean in to listen closely to hear. Her voice is full of heat and gravel, of the longing she has for those things she feels she may never fully know: love, a family unbroken, a place to settle. Earley’s rich weaving of time, science, place, point of view, and plot is created with language and form that is surprising and stunning. Pain, joy, loss, accomplishment, need, survival, love, terror, and tolerance are among the roads on this map of everything, and they all—rather miraculously—lead to a certain and satisfactory grace.”

– Patricia Ann McNair, author of The Temple of Air