The Fold In The Map
Alec MacLeod is recently retired, financially comfortable, and quietly unsure what his life is supposed to become.
After years working as a government economist, his days are no longer shaped by routine, duty, meetings, reports, or the steady logic of professional life. He has his flat in Edinburgh, his books, his habits, and the familiar streets of the city around him. Yet something has begun to feel absent.
Then, returning by train from Glasgow, Alec looks out of the window and sees a part of Edinburgh he does not recognise. Old tenements. Warmly lit rooms. Open fires. Bookshelves visible through high windows. A street that looks as though it has always been there, yet somehow has never been noticed before.
The place is called Blackwell.
It is difficult to find, barely present in official records, and strangely resistant to ordinary explanation. Maps falter around it. Streets seem to shift. Buildings appear to contain more space than they should. People arrive when they are needed, often without quite knowing why. Drawn by curiosity, instinct, and a feeling of homecoming he cannot explain, Alec begins to explore Blackwell and its unusual community. He finds Glennie’s bookshop, the Blackwell Tavern, and St Theneva’s church: a place with a contested history, a formidable minister, and a congregation unlike any Alec has known.
But Blackwell is not simply a curiosity. It is under threat. Within the Church of Scotland, officials are preparing to assess churches for possible closure. Buildings must be maintained. Congregations are shrinking. Committees are making decisions. And St Theneva’s, with all its history, oddness, life, and contradiction, may soon be reduced to a line on a confidential list.
As Alec is drawn deeper into Blackwell, he begins to understand that the district is not merely hidden. It has its own quiet logic. It protects, arranges, remembers, and calls people towards the roles they are meant to play. The question is why it has called him.
For Readers Who Enjoy
Literary fiction with atmosphere, intelligence, and a sense of mystery.
Stories set in Edinburgh and the hidden corners of old cities.
Novels about books, maps, churches, history, community, and memory.
Magical realism that remains grounded in everyday life.
Fiction that explores institutions, belief, bureaucracy, and the quiet strangeness of ordinary places.
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
Alec MacLeod
A recently retired government economist, Alec is intelligent, solitary, observant, and at
something of a loose end. His first glimpse of Blackwell unsettles him because it feels less like
discovery and more like recognition.
Pauline Fourlay
Minister Pauline of St Theneva’s is sharp, determined, and deeply connected to Blackwell. She recognizes the community's significance and the threat from those who focus solely on buildings and numbers.
Gavin Ross
A church official was sent to assess properties marked for potential closure, merging outside logic and institutional pressure with Blackwell’s more human reality.
Blackwell
A hidden quarter of Edinburgh with old streets, unexpected rooms, a tavern, a bookshop, a
church, and a talent for making things work out in ways that cannot quite be explained.
