There is a moment in this quasi-memoir – and isn’t all non-fiction quasi-memoir now? – when the author describes getting desperately lost on a densely forested Japanese mountainside, following a stream down, emerging at the bottom, then immediately jumping on a chairlift to go back up again, legs dangling in the air above the dense forest, ‘despite the lack of seatbelt’.

The book itself is something of a high-wire act in this vein. Alice Maddicott sets out to probe the atmospheres of places. How are they generated? What might they mean to us? In her descriptions of visits to different cities, Maddicott gives more weight and credence to emotional and intuitive responses than to conventional information. It’s a collage-like approach, the author building up impressions of the ways places work upon us. She refers to the mysterious ‘old water’ of Istanbul and to Venice as ‘a living archive of its own dream self’, while in Bucharest there is a pervading ‘feeling of being tricked or watched’. Maddicott works with museums and knows that there is no such thing as an ‘inanimate’ object. Places are treated here as ‘living narratives’ in which we can participate. Visitors to a city are likened to ‘water droplets’: they are there, and then not there, but still somehow they are absorbed into the place.

The guiding metaphor, which lends the book its title, is the concept of the ‘tender map’ devised by Madeleine de Scudéry in her 1654 novel Clélie. Briefly fashionable among female coteries in Paris, a tender map consisted of places linked to specific emotions or feelings: for example, Le