The Morning a Word Went Missing

I have always loved the blank parts of maps. As a child I took them as an invitation: nobody has drawn this yet, so somebody should go and look. It was only much later that I began to wonder about the other kind of blank space, the kind that is there because something was once drawn and then quietly taken away. That second kind of blank is where When the Island Lost Its Name began.

A small thing first

I wanted the story to start with something tiny. Not a dragon over the rooftops, not a storm tearing the island loose, but a sign outside a baker's stall. One arrow points to the ferry, another uphill to the bell tower, and in the widest space between them, where the island's name has always been painted in blue, there is now a clean cream patch.

At breakfast, the island still had a name. By noon, Nemi could not remember what it was.

That is the first line of the book, and in a way the whole story grew out of it. What would it feel like if a word you had said every day of your life slipped out of reach, and not only for you, but for the baker, his customers, your little brother holding a basket of warm rolls? Everyone sure it is resting just behind the tongue. Nobody able to find it.

The island and its people

Nemi Aral lives on a sky island of sloping coral roofs, patched market awnings and a round bell tower whose great bell has always rung two notes, one low and one bright, so close together that she heard them as a single welcome. On the morning the name goes, she hears the low note alone. Soon the ferries can barely find the landing, and the pale threads of light that guide people along the paths begin to dim.

I wanted the island to feel lived in rather than polished. There is a step on the ferry stairs that sighs under a boot. The market roof leaks in a particular corner. Nemi's mother steers a crowded ferry through rain and fog, and her brother Kelu asks the questions the adults are trying to walk around. When he wonders aloud whether people might forget their house too, his mother says simply that they will tell them again. I think that small answer holds a great deal of the book.

Then there are Nemi's companions. Banu is a bell mender's apprentice who can hear a crack before he can see it, though he is less sure what to do when something goes wrong between friends. Sela has come from Orin, the neighbouring island of stepped blue roofs, and is stranded now that the way home is fading. She would very much like not to be treated as a problem to solve. I grew fond of all three while I was writing, and of the way they argue and listen and keep going.

A map left folded

At the heart of the story is Nemi's grandfather. He taught her every turning path on the island, and he drew routes nobody else trusted in bad weather. Since he died, his last unfinished map has stayed folded in the drawer beneath his empty chair. Nemi has not opened it, because opening it would feel like asking him a question he can no longer answer.

Anyone who has lost someone they love will recognise that drawer. I did not want grief to be the loudest thing in the book, but I wanted it to be honest and present, sitting quietly at the edge of the kitchen like the chair itself. When the whole island starts asking a question, Nemi has to decide whether she is ready to unfold that map.

Her search takes her through a closed archive, across a bridge soaked with rain and down into the hidden underside of the island, where she begins to uncover a piece of history that was taken off the official maps. I will not say more than that. What I can tell you is that this is not a story where one lost object puts everything right. Mending the bell will take neighbours who remember things differently being willing to hear one another.

Who it is for

I wrote this book for curious young readers, and for the grown ups who read with them. It is an adventure, with ferries in fog and a storm on its way, but it is also a story about families and the stories they keep, about who gets to speak for a place, and about how home becomes home for everyone who helps to hold it.

If you have ever drawn a map of your own street, or wondered why an old name was changed, or missed someone so much that you could not open their things, I think Nemi will feel like a friend. Her island is waiting, a little blank in the middle, and she could use some company on the stairs up to the bell. Come and find her in When the Island Lost Its Name.