The Atlas Of Us By Tracy Buchanan

The Atlas of Us by Tracy Buchanan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From the moment I started to read this novel, to the moment that I had finished it, I could hardly put it down at all. I was drawn in to each characters lives as they were reveled with each page turned. I recall the terror of the tsunami that had hit the world on boxing day in 2004, despite only being around 10/11 years old. I can remember seeing it all over the news and in the papers and it was quite close to home too as my sister had a friend who lived in Sri Lanka, which was also affected by the horror, thankfully her friend and the family was safe, but I can still remember how worried my sister had been because of it and how she would call the hotlines for family and friends to find out information, it was like we were all holding our breathes until that moment. Even if we hadn't had that connection, the disaster had affected the whole world in a way, something we still think about many years later, we're still learning how to cope with the terror of something like this happening again as well as many other natural disasters.
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[Spoilers ahead, only read on if you have read the book already or don't mind spoilers.]
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Louise Fenton travels to Thailand in the aftermath of the 2004, boxing day tsunami in search of her estranged mother. From the moment she arrives on the island, her world is thrown in to a spiral of dread and hope at every corner. There she meets a friend of her mother's son, Sam, who starts to help her in her search and soon discovers a bag which had belonged to her mother, inside, an Atlas which does not, when viewing the body, Louise finds that she cannot tell if the body is her mother or not since the water has done much damage to the woman.
It's while there that Fenton meet's a man called Jay who recalls the body of being that of Claire Shreve, a travel journalist and a very close friend. Within a few moments, Louise discovers that the atlas belongs to Claire and they agree to meet the next day.

At first Louise is on edge about reading through the atlas until Sam mentions of how it could help in the search of her mother, Nora.
With each chapter, we come to know more about Claire and her journey over the years from Exmoor in the UK, to the moment the tsunami hit in Thailand. We hear about how she grows with a farmer called Milo, going through the motions of pure horror and lies in his own family and history.

The novel is full of ups and downs, twists and turns until we finally reach the moment in which Louise finally meets Claire and the truth about the body turns out to be her mother. Throughout the whole novel, we follow both Claire's and Louise's paths they curve through life, learning more and more about their failed marriages and the journey through motherhood and through not being able to have children. In fact, within looking at both of them, their lives are eerily quite similar in way which, their only connection through Nora being friends with Holly's mother.

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