The city is shrinking now. Gaining some fiction of cohesion as it recedes into contours and right-angles, pastel-washed slopes, a matrix of shipyards. The brutalist clock tower on the port strikes the hour with an unexpected ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ jingle. I am leaving Piraeus harbour on a ferry at sunset, staking out a seat by the window, attempting to wedge my overstuffed cabin-sized suitcase somewhere out of the path of the (apparently all) more compact and more composed passengers onboard. This is typically how I travel—outsized and overburdened, with books and clothes and vitamins, whatever the mode of transport. But more and more these days, I find myself on ferries, which is good because a) I hate flying and b) there are no luggage restrictions which means that I may be even more overladen with volumes—hardcover ones even. Typically, the mobile library is constituted by various textual holes-of-shame in my reading history (Proust, Walker, Kapuscinksi), an un-started novel, a short-story anthology, a book of poetry (normally multiples), alongside a well-intentioned work of non-fiction or two and my well-travelled but equally neglected Arabic textbook. Thus equipped, I then proceed to spend the majority of the voyage (and trip beyond) gazing vacantly out the window.

This time it’s different. At this point in my life (and in what feels like writing-induced macular degeneration), I feel as happy to read landscapes as words on a page, so in an effort to focus my mind as well as my scale, I have settled on two texts: Maria Tumarkin’s Traumascapes and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The pair was a relatively random selection from my extensive pile of to-reads. But perhaps I had some inkling of how both texts might reference my surrounds on this trip—the Greek Aegean island of Lesvos, which I am revisiting for a book I am writing about exile and migration in the Mediterranean.