Khaled Abu El-atta

In a city that is constantly redrawing itself, Amal works in a quiet municipal office where streets are renamed and buildings slowly disappear from the record. Her task is simple: measure rooms, verify occupants, and file reports that help the city move forward. But behind every address is a life that refuses to fit inside the official form. As Amal walks through apartments marked for clearance, she begins to notice the details others overlook-doorframes scratched with the height of growing children, drawers filled with letters no one wants to leave behind, rooms that seem to hold the weight of what has already been lost.
At home, another kind of uncertainty begins to take shape, one that no form can contain and no report can explain. The more Amal observes, the more she realizes that the city is not only changing its streets. It is quietly rewriting the lives within them. A Map of Empty Houses is a haunting literary novel about memory, silence, and the fragile things that remain when a place begins to forget its people.