With the publishing industry reporting a decline in overall book sales last year, many were surprised to hear that 28-year-old Reif Larson secured nearly $1 million from Penguin Press for the rights to his debut novel.

How good could it be? The book was released this summer and it’s that good. Larsen will read from “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth on Friday, June 26 at 7 p.m.

Twelve-year-old genius cartographer T. S. Spivet feels like he doesn’t fit in with his family on a ranch in Montana. One afternoon, he receives a phone call from the Smithsonian announcing that he has won the prestigious Baird Award. Sneaking out before dawn the next morning, T.S. hops a freight train with his sights set on Washington, D.C. His adventures and observations come faster than he can map them all.

Perhaps the most important discovery is one that brings him closer to home. While heading eastward, T.S. reads a secret family history that follows an ancestor’s trip west. He finds places more difficult to map than the physical world—states of loss, love and loneliness.      

The book combines a coming-of-age story with an on-the-road adventure through the eyes of a smart and sensitive child who adults can relate to and even learn about themselves from.

“It’s a book about a kid encountering the crazy mixed-up world of adults, and all the strange signs and symbols that adults use to communicate with each other,” Larsen said. “It’s about how we process and see the world and how we’ve come to that system of seeing the world.”

Larsen’s interest in kids that possess extraordinary abilities involves the way adults react around them. “They start to project their hopes and fears and desires onto them, and you see that in this book,” he said.

The imaginative book has earned international attention, selling in 22 countries. It does so while bucking the trend of electronic and audio books, which wouldn’t be true to the original format because the notes and illustrations pull the plot into the margins of the page. While some books with images and footnotes can be tedious, these meticulous drawings are like recess for the eyes.  

Initially, Larsen wrote the book without images, but he said it was missing the intimacy and longing that defines the plot. When he began adding the drawings, he erased text where the narrative was being told through the images. The decision to include images came from the character, he said, and is not “form just for the sake of form.”   

“I really feel like the images are as much a part of the storytelling as the text. They’re kind of inseparably linked. It’s not like you can take out the images or the sidebars and have the book,” Larsen said. “The heart of the book is in the sidebars.”

As opposed to the representational illustrations in children’s books, these images do not always show exactly what the text is about. Instead, the reader follows arrows that represent the character’s leaps of logic. This process is like embodying his imagination, Larsen said.

He created all the drawings in the book, except some by a graphic designer who also tweaked the original images to make them look more like rough sketches. Both of Larsen’s parents are visual artists, which scared him away from the challenging and often lonely field, but it had an influence.

“I was always surrounded by people circling their canvases and paint everywhere, so I grew up drawing a lot. I like to draw,” he said.

He is interested in the collision of text and image as a way to tell a story. Because he isn’t a trained illustrator, each one in the book took about six hours—about a year and a half total.

One of the most subtly sad details of the drawings is the way the character begins hiding his brother’s name after his accidental death. The child quietly grieves while living in an already delicate family dynamic broken by his irreversible mistake. Larsen said the hidden names pay homage to Al Hirschfeld, whose drawings of famous people in the New York Times always included his daughter’s name, Nina.

Larsen said maps are like a good story in the selective way the topographer gives only certain details. He said he used to spend hours looking at an outdated National Geographic atlas, making up stories about places he’d never been to. “I think there’s something about them giving you a scale, giving you some names, showing you where the sea and where certain mountain ranges are and so forth,” he said. “It’s inviting. It’s asking you to invent stories about this place.”

The maps Larsen included in the book are not only of places, but also emotions and actions. He said he’s more interested in the map-maker than whether the maps are made correctly. It’s the best and perhaps only way the boy in the story knows how to interpret the adult world. “In this book, I think I’m gently expanding the definition of what is a map,” he said.

Larsen did extensive research for the novel, resulting in many factual scientific details. He also taught a writing workshop on a dude ranch in Idaho. “Originally, I was going to like offer to be a ranch hand to learn the nomenclature and ways of the cowboy, but I knew I’d probably be a real liability,” he said. Along with an affinity for maps, this is another trait Larsen shares with his main character.

Larsen studied at Brown University and has taught at Columbia University, where he received a master’s in fiction. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Despite the success of his first novel, Larsen said he isn’t going to follow anyone else’s high expectations for the next one. “The next book will probably be quieter, and it’s not going to have images, but it’ll have something else,” he said. “The next book is going to be quite different.”

RiverRun Bookstore is located at 20 Congress St., Portsmouth, 603-431-2100. For more information, visit www.riverrunbookstore.com.