The Cartographer of Lost Winds

By Hichem Karoui

Tunis, late 1970s. In a city where the modern world brushes against the labyrinthine alleys of the ancient Medina, translator Karim Mansour accepts a simple commission: to decipher the papers of a missing British academic, Dr. Horn. But the documents found in the scholar's abandoned villa are nothing like the meteorological notes he expected. Instead, they are a cryptic collection of diagrams, Sufi poetry, and arcane references to the "Anemoi Mapping"-an ancient art of charting not the winds of the sky, but the currents of fate, memory, and possibility that flow through the city.Horn believed that Tunis was a convergence point for these metaphysical winds, and that certain places, scents, and sounds could act as keys to perceiving a deeper reality. Sceptical but intrigued, Karim follows Horn's fragmented map into the city's heart. He walks the sun-drenched streets of Sidi Bou Said and the shadowy courtyards of the Medina, and with each step, the world subtly shifts. He overhears conversations that echo his own past and glimpses figures that seem to belong to another time.His investigation leads him to a mysterious antique dealer who speaks in riddles of the city's breath and warns him that some territories, once mapped, offer no return. As obsession takes hold, Karim realises he is not merely translating Horn's research but continuing it, drawing his own map of the unseen world. But as a rare celestial alignment approaches-one Horn believed was the key-Karim faces a choice: destroy the impossible map and remain in the world he knows, or attempt to follow the cartographer of lost winds into the very fabric of reality itself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1787954528
• ISBN13: 9781787954526
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Global East-West (London)
• Length: 178 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.0"