About the book
When Jeroen Theunissen was about twenty years old, he found a map of Europe in a travel shop. It was covered with thick purple lines marking long-distance hiking trails. Years later, when the author encountered a bout of melancholy, panic attacks and depression and felt trapped in an unhappy marriage, he left behind everyone and everything – including his two children – to start a six-month walk from South-West Ireland to the Bosporus. In so doing, Jeroen Theunissen was following in the tracks of the British Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had travelled by foot in 1933 from the Hook of Holland in the Netherlands to Constantinople, straight through a Europe at a pivotal moment – Adolf Hitler had recently assumed power. The Europe through which Theunissen walked faces numerous problems, including climate change, nationalism and a refugee crisis.
I = Cartographer is many books in one. It’s an account of a hiking journey. An attempt to grasp our rapidly changing world. The story of a man who runs away from responsibilities, only to return to try to create a home for his children.
