A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut that traces a twelve-year-old genius mapmaker’s attempts to understand the ways of the world.

When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal—if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal—is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls. T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo to the East Coast. Once he’s aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of “rims,” and the pleasures of McDonald’s, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.’s eyes, and in his thorough investigation of the outside world, he also reveals himself.

As he travels away from the ranch and his family, we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.’s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family T.S. left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads, he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.

All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science’s inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.

T.S.’s trip begins at the Coppertop Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey’s movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.

Praise For The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“Miraculous... The novel is a cabinet of wonders, an odyssey of self-discovery, a family romance, a symphony of topography, geology and American history. The book hardly seems able to stay between its covers, bulging as it is with so many astonishments, so many crossings of fictional lines... Read it and marvel. In doing so, we gain a map of the world, a vision of our own troubled heads and hearts, a legend for our own bewildered epoch.”
—Bookpage

“Intellectually provocative.”
—Booklist

“Two predictions about The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: readers are going to love it as much as I did, and few if any will have experienced anything like it. I’m flabbergasted by Reif Larsen’s talent, and I was warmed by his generosity--if this book were a mug of Sundy’s magic juice, I would surely hold it in two hands. The drawings that cascade and tumble through the pages could be a gimmick—cutie-poo tatting on the edge of a lace doily--and in the hands of a lesser novelist, that might have been the case. But because T.S. is such a vivid and realistic character (in spite of his Asperger’s/OCD tics, not because of them), they add texture, humanity, and humor. This is a very funny book. I laughed until tears ran down my face when T.S. explains how to win at Oregon Trail, and if he were a real boy, I would seek him out so he could teach me how to win at the old Pitfall Harry game. Here is a book that does the impossible: it combines Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Little Miss Sunshine. Good novels entertain; great ones come as a gift to the readers who are lucky enough to find them. This book is a treasure.”
—Stephen King