16 Artists, Writers, Thinkers and 16 Personal Maps. Each one exploring the idea of what a map can be. The result is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.

“We really like the idea of starting an adventure through maps. The ability to find yourself in the unknown and discover new places – that’s what exploring is all about.” —Google Maps Team

“Where You Are is beautiful. Its contents delight the mind, its composition the senses.” —Will Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor

“These imaginative and irreverent personal cartographies expand the conception of a map as a flat reflection of geography and reclaim it, instead, as a living, breathing, dimensional expression of the human spirit.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Where You Are is a book of maps. And it’s also a website www.where-you-are.com.

It’s a collection of writing (non-fiction and fiction) and visuals (drawings, photographs, paintings) that explodes what a map is. A wide range of writers, thinkers, artists responded to what their map would be, bringing together human stories about modern, everyday personal lives and mapping.

Those stories range from Chloe Aridjis’ short story mapping out the daily journeys of a homeless woman in Mexico City, to John Simpson essay that looks at the perils of following GPS systems in South Africa, to James Bridle mapping the technology and looking at how GPS was developed in the first place, to Geoff Dyer mapping out his childhood in Cheltenham according to sex, death and drugs, to Leanne Shapton documenting her everyday desk objects at the end of each working day.

Where You Are plants the flag at an amazing map-shifting point: from one kind of map — the geographical kind that gets you get from a to b — to another kind of map altogether — a life map that tells human stories about our everyday.

Where You Are begs the question: What would your personal map be? Here is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.