A map of the world

A Map of the World is a novel by the American writer Jane Hamilton, published in 1994.

Alice has been fighting a low-level war with herself for years: about her temper, about how she looks after her children, and about whether the move to the farm was a mistake she cannot admit to. The death of a neighbour's child while Alice was watching the children is the event the whole novel turns on, and the book follows what the town makes of it, what the courts make of it, and what Alice makes of herself. Hamilton tells the story in Alice's voice and then in her husband Howard's, and the two accounts differ in ways that matter. The novel is about guilt and about the small community in which a person's reputation is decided by other people's grief.

It was adapted for television, and it remains one of the author's best known novels, partly because the question it asks about a single mistake is one most readers can imagine answering badly.