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Some places remember us before we remember them.

Alec MacLeod is recently retired, comfortably settled, and quietly adrift.

Then, on a train journey back to Edinburgh, he glimpses a part of the city he does not recognise. Old tenements. Warmly lit rooms. Bookshelves visible through high windows. A street that feels impossible and yet strangely familiar.


The place is called Blackwell.


It barely appears on maps. It resists easy explanation. Streets seem to lead there only when they choose to. Buildings behave according to their own quiet logic. People arrive when they are needed. Coincidence has the weight of intention.


Drawn by curiosity, memory, and a feeling he cannot explain, Alec begins to explore this hidden quarter of Edinburgh. There he finds Glennie’s bookshop, the Blackwell Tavern, and St Theneva’s church — a church with a contested past, an unusual congregation, and a future under threat.

Book cover for “Quite a British Hood” with a car, bridge, and man in sunglasses over a city map background

About the Book

The Fold In The Map is an atmospheric Edinburgh novel about hidden places, old maps, church politics, bookshops, memory, belonging, and the peculiar ways in which communities survive.

Blending literary fiction with subtle magical realism, the novel follows Alec MacLeod as he steps away from the ordered certainties of his former life and into a part of the city where ordinary rules no longer quite apply.


It is a story about the gaps in official records, the limits of rational explanation, and the places that seem to know us before we know ourselves.

Meet the Author

Ian McFatridge is the author of The Fold In The Map, a literary novel set in and around Edinburgh.

His writing explores place, memory, belief, institutions, community, and the quiet mysteries that shape ordinary lives.


To learn more about Ian, his background, and the inspiration behind his work, visit the full Author page.

Book cover titled “Write a British Hood” standing on a light gray surface.

About the Book

The Fold In The Map is an atmospheric Edinburgh novel about hidden places, old maps, church politics, bookshops, memory, belonging, and the peculiar ways in which communities survive.

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The Fold In The Map is an atmospheric Edinburgh novel about hidden places, old maps, church politics, bookshops, memory, belonging, and the peculiar ways in which communities survive. Blending literary fiction with subtle magical realism, the novel follows Alec MacLeod as he steps away from the ordered certainties of his former life and into a part of the city where ordinary rules no longer quite apply.


It is a story about the gaps in official records, the limits of rational explanation, and the places that seem to know us before we know ourselves.

Place

Blackwell is more than a setting. It is the centre of the novel’s mystery and one of its most important presences. The district seems to remember, respond, and rearrange itself around the people who belong there.

Memory

Alec’s journey begins with a feeling he cannot rationalise: the sense that he has recognised a

place he has never knowingly seen before. The novel explores the strange relationship between

memory, imagination, and belonging.

Maps

Maps are meant to explain the world, but in The Fold In The Map, the map is also where

certainty begins to fail. Blackwell exists in the gaps, folds, errors, and omissions of official

geography.

Community

The people of Blackwell are drawn together by need, accident, history, and something stranger.

The novel asks how communities form, how they sustain themselves, and why some places

seem to know exactly who they require.

Institutions

The threatened future of St Theneva’s church brings the novel into contact with bureaucracy,

decline, committees, reform, and the gap between institutional decision-making and lived

human value.

Belief

The book is concerned not only with formal religion, but with all the things people choose to

trust: places, stories, rituals, memory, coincidence, and one another.

Key Themes

What Readers Are Saying

A wonderful book which conjures up a really strong feeling of Edinburgh and asks some much bigger questions without ever feeling heavy. Thoroughly recommended!

Samuel White

July 2026

It's a fantastic story!

Sabine Imhof

July 2026

This is a refreshingly original book which rather defies classification. Magical thinking in the purest sense of the word. I enjoyed it for its intelligence and facility with ideas. Well worth reading.

Anonymous

September 2026

Fantastic book. Highly recommended for Edinburgh dwellers!

James Carter

September 2026