Books have strange histories. This one is no exception. There is no doubt, however, that it is motivated by a combination of personal and professional interests. On the personal level, political conflict has touched my life on many occasions and in very tangible ways.

As a Palestinian Arab now living in the diaspora, I have grappled with the reality of conflict from afar, almost on a daily basis. But I have also been trying to make sense of my own identity. For the exile, parenthood accentuates these concerns in a myriad of ways. When, at an early age, my elder son asked me whether he should play for Palestine or Scotland in any World Cup final, I knew he was grappling with his own identity. The fact that there is no hope, I should perhaps say danger, of that happening in my lifetime or even his – although they say miracles do happen – does not negate the validity of his question. The question about football was in fact a question about ‘Who am I?’, a proxy for concerns of an existential kind. And when my children used to ask how a country (Palestine) could exist if it is not on the map, I knew that models of reality could be more meaningful than acts of memory and the mental images the imagination can conjure. I owe my interest in maps as cartographic-linguistic texts to these family encounters.