The Cartographer’s Apprentice

Jan Coenraets is fourteen when he is bound to the workshop of Willem Doedes, whose maps of the Indies are the most accurate in the Republic and are becoming, year by year, slightly less true.

Wend’s novel is about the point at which a small lie becomes an infrastructure — the invented island that appears on a chart, then on a copy of a chart, then in an insurance schedule, then in a court case. It is also very funny about the guild system.

Peter Ollerenshaw handles the Dutch names without making a performance of them, which sounds like a small thing and is not.