The moral compass points toward compassion: Read an extract from The Year the Maps Changed by Danielle Binks

Prologue

Maps lie.

Or at least, they don’t always tell the truth.

They’re like us humans that way.

Mr Khouri would say it’s because they can’t show us everything about a place or the people in it. Maps don’t tell you about the ownership, genealogy or history of an area. A map doesn’t even really tell you where to begin or end – those ones with Start Here and X Marks the Spot are just that way in movies, or kids’ menu colouring-in placemats. Really it’s up to us – the people who live within the borders – to keep the truth and know the way.

And lately I’ve been thinking that it doesn’t matter so much where you end up, if you can’t remember how you got there in the first place. Like my pop would say: It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

Remembering is like retracing my steps. There are so many different trails to this story and it’s hard to know which one to take. But I need to lay down a way to see everything that happened this year just gone: the war, Nora, Operation Safe Haven and the baby we couldn’t keep.

I was eleven when everything started and twelve by the end. But that’s another way that maps don’t tell the whole truth – because it felt like the distance I travelled was a lot further than that.

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