The Lighthouse at Zero

Some places are hidden for a reason. She hid this one.

Map conservator Tara Westerly has lost her job, her reputation and, she is starting to suspect, a great deal more. Then a stranger collapses on her doorstep in the London rain with an 1861 survey sheet showing an island that isn't there, and a note in the margin in her own handwriting:

Kept by T. W. Do not reveal. Do not return.

She has no memory of writing it.

In seven days, a billionaire's satellite network will photograph every square metre of the Earth, live, for ever. Once it sees a place, that place can never be hidden again. And it is looking for the island.

Hunted from London to Lisbon, Istanbul and the Himalayas, with her best friend Dev (a wedding DJ with no survival skills), a parrot who talks in other people's voices, and a growing crew of unlikely allies, Tara must learn the rules of a secret Guild that hides places by rubbing them off maps. Every hiding has a price. It costs a memory. And you never get to choose which one.

To save the people she loves, Tara has to go back to the one place she swore she never would, and find out what she gave up to hide it.

The Lighthouse at Zero is a fast, funny, big-hearted treasure-hunt adventure about maps, memory and the places worth protecting. Clean enough to share with older children, sharp enough for adults.

Book One of A Tara Westerly Adventure.