She asked the nurses how this could possibly happen when surely he had VIP access to all of the most sought-after, tried and tested, tumour-blitzing drugs, and they raised their eyebrows and said it did not really work like that. Knowing something inside out does not make you immune to its power. Lia thought of difficult mothers and books she’d read a thousand times that still made her cry and thought, yes, this seemed very true. 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, He smiled widely and pressed his palm to his wife’s cheek. She kissed his wrist and said, I don’t want to die. He took a heavy breath. It smelt of earth. Every Sunday Harry would fall asleep with stains of their garden still on his hands. It is important not to put gloves on, he would say, it is important to feel the soil, let the dirt get under your fingernails, you need to hear through tips of skin what it is the world wants.

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 – Owusu said that Mortimer had “penetrated the body and spirit of literature, taking an experience, one familiar to so many of us, and making it unique”.This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman’s life—told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease. 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 – When it was Iris’s turn to present her work to the class, she stood and held the sheet of paper up proudly. This striking novel takes a formally inventive approach to a woman’s terminal-cancer diagnosis... Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy, and Mortimer asks readers to think about death as something that 'does not happen in the first or third person, but in the second.'" — The New Yorker There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’

Fish is to (hop, run, swim) as bird is to (walk, slide, fly). Hole is to (grown, whole, entire) as grown is to (groan, whistle, full). Scream is to (flood, fold, whisper) as brave is to (laugh, beat, weak). It all felt very futile, very vain, but then Iris had announced quite recently that vanity is just self-respect after Lia had suggested she take a break from staring in the mirror, and it had seemed very profound. 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. You can imagine why, as this stony-ghost-what-reminds-me-of-someone enters what I consider to be a dear dwelling place of mine, I should begin to feel a little put out, a little bitter, incommodious. Her mother began to doze off, the wrinkles on her forehead tumbling between her brows, piling up on the arch of her nose. She looked so odd, so old, so tired. Anne seemed out of place everywhere except church. Lia used to marvel at the way her mother’s form would slot into church, as if the two made each other whole, somewhat understandable. After Peter’s services, while he was at the front Playing Priest Perfectly and the church was squeezing the congregation out two by two by two, Lia would catch her mother turning to face the altar, gazing up at the dove and the olive branch pieced into the window, receiving, it would seem, direct instructions from the Lord Himself. Catching the end of a secret meant only for her.How unusual, Anne said, adjusting her body in the seat, hoping the exchange had reached an acceptable conclusion. An original and memorable novel written in shimmering prose. The characters stayed with me long after I’d finished reading."— Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story of coming-of-age at the end of a life. Utterly heart-breaking yet darkly funny, Maddie Mortimer’s debut is a symphonic journey through one woman’s body: a celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel, some of which was written - between shifts in a vintage clothing outlet - in the Foyles bookshop cafe in London. Foyles commissioned Mortimer to write a personal blog about her work, in which she says:

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It’s spreading. Fineran said the novel was a “standout read” in a “very strong list”. Brown added: “It’s an incredibly inventive and, at times, genius novel, seamlessly blending competing values from science and religion to bluntness and subtlety.”

About the author

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is the lyrical tale of a woman, her body and the illness that coinhabits it. Told from the perspectives of Lia herself, her daughter Iris and the (callous? Cynical? Caring…?) voice of the disease itself, we follow her life after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Despite the fact that my head is still too full with it to write a proper-form review, here are three things you need to know: What I think is most impressive about the book is that put all the experimentation to one side and this would still be a deeply thoughtful book about the human condition with a complex and involving plot and a series of fully realised characters. Mortimer: "I was kind of fascinated with this idea of this like young girl waiting around for God. This idea that God to her is defined by His absence, the same way that Matthew, the boy who arrives at this vicarage and ends up becoming the great love of her life, he throughout her life is more absent than present. And so her relationship with God an her relationship with Matthew are kind of intrinsic, I see him as God anthropomorphized almost." Would he continue to love Lia if she were to change into something else? Does love even continue like we think it does? Does love preserve itself?