Description: On vacation in Florence, Sarah Dunant found herself in the crumbling courtyard of an old hospital, watching two men in white coats roll a stretcher. Under a pale sheet lay what was clearly a dead body, bound for the morgue. This random sight provided the inspiration for her provocative new thriller, Mapping the Edge, also bringing to mind a newspaper headline Dunant had noticed just a few days before -- young woman goes missing on holiday. "I thought", she recalls, "of the small bag I was carrying: no wallet, no passport (I had been warned of thieves), just money and a map. And I wondered how long it would take to find someone who either wouldn't or couldn't come home. If it wasn't death, what might it be that prevented her? And what nightmares would her family and friends concoct as they sat waiting back home?"

Dunant masterfully stretches the boundaries of crime fiction in her exploration of the dynamics of a woman's disappearance. Mulling over the unknown figure headed for the morgue, Dunant recalls, "By the time I got back to my hotel, I had a book waiting to be written".

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