Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Moving between Lia’s past and present, the book is a look at memory, mother-daughter relationships, and coming to terms with death.

Her coat hung limply on the corner of the door like some stuffed and sorry scarecrow, skewered deep into its sacred patch of land, waving away the world. It follows the last few months of Lia’s life–an illustrator in her forties married to university professor, Harry, and mother to precocious tweenage daughter, Iris. Indeed, it’s in Mortimor’s eclectic font selection, in the width and the depth of her margins and breaks, in her choice of when the typeface is bold, and when it is not, that the utter horror of Lia’s joyful, unstoppable cancer is most effectively rendered. Lia has only one child, Iris; her magical, awkward, endlessly creative daughter who has just entered the battleground of her teenage years. That evening, they knelt by the foot of Lia’s bed and prayed together, palms pressed tightly together, the thick weave of the carpet patterning bare knees.It entered rooms before she did, often announcing her arrival, and then obstructing everyone else from moving about. But she cannot prevent Lia’s illness from bringing family secrets to the surface, which draw the nonlinear narrative back into the past. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, review: A bracing debut with a verve for life This novel is narrated by its protagonist’s cancer as it spreads through her body.

It was not simply an ability to accurately depict the world, to replicate the exact gradient of a crow’s beak or the detailed creases of a hand, held out. There are three narrative threads in the book that are not only in constant communication, but are actively competing against one another to ‘tell’ the story. With formal audacity and emotional elegance, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies shows family bonds reshaping across generations to reveal, ultimately, how love and beauty reside in finitude. Round and round it went as the hours rung on, the rhythms and notes folding over each other like spells that could cure, that sore something, rising and rattling in awful interludes.I wrote it as a way of spending time with her, working through grief and the intense period of experiencing someone die,” she added.

Perhaps she had simply been harder to love, with her strangeness, her secrecy, that early quiet rage.

Lia, meanwhile, has to juggle the side effects of her chemo alongside the day-to-day demands of motherhood in “this act of pulling days out from one’s sleeve”. She inhales around thirteen pints of air a day and exhales billions and billions of molecules of oxygen in a moment. He adored Iris’s scowls; the total transformation of her face, the way her forehead mottled and her eyes disappeared under the deep shadow of her brows.

When Lia had first been diagnosed, all those years ago, he often had to remind himself there was nothing coming for them. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a beautiful novel about death that feels completely alive, pulsing with tenderness and wit. As Mortimer reveals the romance from her protagonist’s youth, she crafts a kaleidoscopic narrative that is both a coming-of-age and end-of-life story. This book felt so authentic, because when I was dying back in 2021 before my first heart surgery, you do reflect back on your life. Mortimer certainly deserves praise for inventiveness, but her approach isn’t entirely without precedent.As the story unfolds, with Lia becoming weaker and her cancer stronger, the text becomes increasingly bold and then entirely so. Mortimer’s debut has been selected as the best first novel published in the UK and Ireland this year from a strong shortlist of three, which also featured Iron Annie by Luke Cassidy and Keeping the House by Tice Cin.