A saint is crucified on the same Mediterranean island where, centuries later, a Japanese soprano recovers her lost voice. Youths throw a rock through a car windscreen in urban Accra, and a woman sees this as a sign she will never reproduce. A murderer escapes across the Sydney suburbs, bringing together an ex-swimming champion, a yoga devotee and a Chinese virgin. An insolent nephew recovers from illness to ask his wealthy aunt for accommodation for himself and his pregnant wife. In Hong Kong, a mistress awaits her married lover in a luxury hotel, and at a summer party outside Verona, a Ukrainian émigré seduces a heavily pregnant woman's husband in his last foray into the world of hedonism. After his father's car strikes a fox, a boy roams a French village at night, and in West Africa a young advertising executive tries to make sense of a corpse in an Elvis shirt, and an American woman who sleeps with her dogs.

The Cartography of Others is a collection of twenty stories that take place from fumy Accra to the Italian Dolomites, from suburban Sydney to high-rise Hong Kong. Lives are mapped, unpicked, crafted, overturned. Each story inhabits a location that becomes as vital as the characters themselves, men and women who are often far from home, immersed in unfamiliar cultures, estranged from those they hold dear. Love is panicked, worn, tested.