Explore the places that time forgot. These abandoned, mysterious, sleeping monuments around the world have been relegated to the margins of history.

From ancient ruins and crumbling castles to more recent relics – an art deco New York subway station, a Soviet ghost town in the Arctic Circle, a flooded Thai mall teeming with aquatic life – Travis Elborough takes you on a journey into these strange, overlooked, and disappearing worlds and immortalizes them in this book of original maps, accompanied by moving historic and geographic accounts of each site.

The featured locations are a stark reminder of what was, and the accounts in this investigative book help to bring their stories back to life, telling us what happened, when and why, and to whom. The book features 40 sites, including:

• Santa Claus, Arizona, USA: A festive tourist resort-turned-ghost town deep in the desert where you could once meet Santa Claus any day of the year;


• Crystal Palace Subway, London, UK: One of the city’s best-kept secrets is an underground, cathedral-like relic that many Victorian commuters bustled through;


• Montserrat, West Indies: The small Caribbean island with a population of 5,000 that was evacuated when its volcano erupted in 1995. The volcano is still active, and nearly half the island remains a designated exclusion zone;


• Balaklava Submarine Base, Crimea: The former top-secret Soviet submarine base that was kept off all official maps and known as Object 825 GTS;


• Volterra Psychiatric Hospital, Tuscany, Italy: Once dubbed ‘the place of no return’, this long-closed lunatic asylum once housed 6,000 patients who were never allowed to leave.

From eerie ghost towns to epic undersea monuments, armchair travelers and adventure seekers will be captivated by this curious atlas of strange and surreal abandoned sites across the world. It follows on from the success of the award-winning title Atlas of Vanishing Places, and forms part of an atlas series that offers lesser-known histories of hidden, fascinating locations worldwide.

Also in the Unexpected Atlas series: Atlas of Improbable Places, Atlas of Untamed Places, Atlas of the Unexpected and Atlas of Vanishing Places (WINNER Illustrated Book of the Year - Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020).