A MAP OF EVERYTHING

A Map of Everything includes illustrations and visual art by Christa Donner, a world renowned artist teaching at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Christa is known for revisions of the female body, health, and illness through drawing, video, collage, small press comics and large scale installation works.

  • Visit the website for the book.
  • Purchase the book from Indiebound.
  • Purchase the soundtrack for the book, featuring 15 original recordings from renowned performance artists written in response to the novel.
  • Purchase the e-book in Kindle format.

A Map of Everything is a 2015 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for LGBT Debut!

Lambda Literary Awards - Elizabeth Earley

Anne’s sister, a bright and lovely teenager, sustains a traumatic brain injury after a near-fatal car accident. As a result, Anne and her siblings and parents are thrown into a decades-long struggle for belonging, deliverance and redemption — with surprising results. A MAP OF EVERYTHING intimately explores the fragile nature of family dynamics, revealing what is salvaged, what is lost, and what is gained after a tragedy hits home.

Reviews and Publicity

The Nervous Breakdown Self Interview
Novel Excerpt published in The Nervous Breakdown
Lambda Literary Review book review
COOL Cleveland book review
Author Interview on Literary New England Radio Show
Author Interview on Lunch Ticket

Praise for A Map of Everything

“An exploration of love and tragedy, what we owe to others and what we owe to ourselves, A MAP OF EVERYTHING is eloquent, moody and strangely poetic.”
— Michelle Tea, author of MERMAID IN CHELSEA CREEK and VALENCIA
“Inventive, searingly honest, gorgeously written, this book will both break and heal your heart. With A Map of Everything, Elizabeth Earley charts her own fresh and dazzling territory.”
— Gayle Brandeis, author of THE BOOK OF DEAD BIRDS and SELF STORAGE

 

“Elizabeth Earley’s A MAP OF EVERYTHING is one of the most structurally inventive and emotionally remarkable books I’ve come across in quite a while. So many writers traffic in the sensationalism of event, while Earley wisely knows that this is only the start of the trouble—and that our hearts truly beat and bleed in the repercussions of events. It’s a book that reminds us who we are to each other and to ourselves, and it has a resilient beauty, and a confident and true voice rare in any novel, let alone a debut.”
– Rob Roberge, author of THE COST OF LIVING

 

“In a little over 300 pages, A Map of Everything somehow manages to be a novel about everything: surviving tragedy, love, despair, complex family relationships, identity, how to be a good person, how to live in a world full of contradictions and dangers that are as much internal as external.  This is a remarkable debut novel.  Read it and weep – with both joy and sadness.”
– Christine Sneed, author of LITTLE KNOWN FACTS and PORTRAITS OF A FEW OF THE PEOPLE I’VE MADE CRY
“Elizabeth Earley’s remarkable debut novel, A Map of Everything, deftly follows a family through the complicated trajectory of their lives after one devastating moment on a rain-soaked street. Anne, the youngest, “fifth born”, leads us over the intricate roads of this map, telling stories along the way of June, her beloved, injured sister, and of her siblings and parents. Bold and deeply wounded, Anne is unflinching in her role as narrator and chronicler; we lean in to listen closely to hear. Her voice is full of heat and gravel, of the longing she has for those things she feels she may never fully know: love, a family unbroken, a place to settle.
“Earley’s rich weaving of time, science, place, point of view, and plot is created with language and form that is surprising and stunning. Pain, joy, loss, accomplishment, need, survival, love, terror, and tolerance are among the roads on this map of everything, and they all—rather miraculously—lead to a certain and satisfactory grace.”
– Patricia Ann McNair, author of THE TEMPLE OF AIR

 

“A Map of Everything is a tender story of personal transformation, addiction, loss and memory. Elizabeth Earley is a welcome new voice to literature.”
– Ali Liebegott author of THE IHOP PAPERS and CHA-CHING!
“The writing in A MAP OF EVERYTHING is beautiful. Never shying away from the difficult, and embracing the big emotions, Earley has given us a strong, graceful and finely-etched novel.”
— Leonard Chang, author of CROSSINGS
“In A Map Of Everything, Elizabeth Earley has the eyesight to notice what we trample underfoot, the instinctual intelligence to know why we do the things we do, the heart to rise above obliterating darkness, and – from somewhere – the ability to write like a witch.”
— Peter Nichols, author of the novel, VOYAGE TO THE NORTH STAR, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.

Previous Published excerpts and awards:

Winner: David Friedman prize for the best story in Hair Trigger 31.
“A Map of Two Sisters,” a published story excerpt from the novel in progress.
“Lovingly, Your Sister,” a story excerpt from the novel in progress, published in FUGUE, Issue 35.