Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Iris shrugged like these changes were the easiest things. The street exhaled. Lia watched her half skip through the hallway, the mouth of the house, before disappearing around a corner, down the throat, and felt drenched with the exhaustion of loving someone as much as she did in that moment.

Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language."— Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

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Because this is a remarkable book which combines a fresh voice and literary (as well as typographical) experimentation with a central idea which is universal (but I think seldom covered in fiction), resonant themes, and with a deep maturity in its empathetic understanding of people’s bodies and mind. For all its rich agility, I am not sure it has quite got the polish to make it on to the Booker shortlist, but who knows. As a first novel, it is undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch. Maddie Mortimer was born in London in 1996. She received her BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Lia had grown very fond of her doctor. He had been looking after her and her insides for eight long years on and off and was the perfect cancer doctor in every way, except for the fact that he had just gone and died. Outside the hospital, Harry was waiting in the car park. Anne smiled politely at him and kissed Lia’s cheek, accidentally grazing the edge of her lip. Lia tried to pretend it wasn’t the most intimate moment they had shared in years.

He tries to scream, to shout, to call for the others. Nothing happens. The place remains as quiet as one would expect any left lung to be on a Thursday mid-afternoon. It is then that I realize – The girl was dead. She knew it. She could feel it; the new chill in the air, the slowing of the clouds, the dizzying shift of atmosphere when tragedy drops into an ordinary day like this. The crowd seemed to be multiplying and all Lia could think was – As she confronts what might be the end, memories of her own childhood and a passionate love affair come rushing into her present, unearthing buried secrets and her family’s deepest fears. But Lia still has hope . . . for more time, for more love, for more Iris.A year later, Lia’s projects were nothing short of disturbing. She muttered quietly to herself and seemed always to be scrutinizing their life from afar, leaning against the last of the limestone – looking for things to disbelieve. An extraordinary debut, unlike anything I've read. Wildly inventive, poetic and poignant, this is a rare gem of a novel that took my imagination to new places and touched my heart." —Emma Stonex, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamplighters When it was Iris’s turn to present her work to the class, she stood and held the sheet of paper up proudly.

Yes. It’s an interactive language learning book. Supposed to encourage creative thinking. That sort of thing. In writing that teeters between poetry and prose, this mischievous being revels in pop culture references, from ET to Abba. A grim twist on “Knowing Me, Knowing You” is typical of the novel’s punchy, unapologetic humour. Iris looked up to the ceiling and laughed one of her wide-open golden laughs and said, No no no, you’re just saying that because you’re old. Old people can be bright too. His name was Matthew and her parents had argued about letting him in. He was a boy really, straddling the awkward space between childhood and manhood, growing out of himself. Lia remembered the way he looked at the door as if he were a snake and the rain had just washed off a layer of his skin. This is the best book about cancer I’ve read in a long time. That’s mainly because it’s not just a book about cancer. Unlike many others within the genre, Mortimer doesn’t portray a battle-narrative. There is no hero’s journey of a strong-willed protagonist against a body in revolt, or a personified evil to be vanquished. Instead it’s the story of Lia as a whole, and everything her body holds: memories, heartbreak, love, regrets, experiences; cancer being but one of them. Yes, it’s the story of a body’s annihilation, but only secondary to being about the life it has lived.Maddie Mortimer's dazzling debut novel about a woman with breast cancer is a life-affirming read - all the more so because of its proximity to death... While there are many books that explore these themes, it is rare to find one that does so in such an immersive and harrowing way." — The Straits Times She listens closely, waiting, as voices splice through the hot air in various directions, pitches, squawks, clamours; Statements like these never sat well in his voice. He thought too deeply for such certainty, observed the world too rigorously. Lia tried not to let it frustrate her. A final slow injection. A clear liquid disappearing inside. The most unnatural of sensations; the kind so severe it forces you to dissociate entirely from your body’s substance, Because the basic plot of the novel, is about a woman and children’s book writer-illustrator Lia who has had a return (and spreading) of the breast cancer which first arose shortly after the birth of her Yellow-loving child Iris (now highly perceptive and recently started at secondary school).

It was a stupid idea. The book was too advanced for her; too advanced, she was sure, for a student of science. But she was trying, at least trying, to understand what was happening to her daughter's body. There are two main strands of the story - a fairly straight omniscient third person narration of the family story, and more poetic and mysterious bold text in which a voice is given to the cancer cells as they explore Lia's body and her thoughts. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a coming-of-age story at the end of a life. It’s the story of Lia, her husband and daughter as they deal with a terminal illness diagnosis that rewrites the family’s history from the inside out. Moving between Lia’s past and her present, the inside and outside of her body, Mortimer stretches the limit of the novel’s form, weaving poetry into her prose throughout. The novel was inspired by Mortimer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010.Toxic masculinity is high among Mortimer’s concerns. The violent passion of Lia’s romance with Matthew is implicit in the description of her first kiss: “It is a remarkable thing that Lia’s senses did not rupture/there and then, that no one was harmed in the making/of the kiss.” When Lia got home, Iris was curled up like a question mark in her very yellow room doing physics homework. Lia asked if she needed any help. She shook her head as if it was unlikely Lia could be of any – Lia’s father had been a graceful, amicable man, who kept his faith close always; he wrapped it about his body tightly so that it never snagged or frayed, tripped or slipped.