Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is about a family coming to terms with the unthinkable: the death of a mother. Playful and funny, profound and heart-breaking, this is a daring debut about motherhood, anatomy, language and the darkness within us all.

**Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize
Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

'Original, memorable, shimmering' - Sarah Moss'Restlessly inventive . . . delicate and persuasive' - The Guardian**

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.

When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia's world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you're simply not ready to let go?

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 astonishing debut is a symphonic journey through one woman's body: a wild and lyrical celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all.

Autorentext
Maddie Mortimer was born in London in 1996. She received her BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Her writing has featured in The Times and her short films have screened at festivals around the world. In 2019 she completed the Faber Academy Writing a Novel course. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel.

Klappentext

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia's body. It's learning her life from the inside. It shape-shifts down the banks of her canals, leaks through her tissue, nooks and nodes. It taps her trachea like the bones of a xylophone. It's spreading.

This is Lia's story. From the perspective of the thing that's killing her.

When Lia finds out that her cancer is back, she tries to keep the landscapes of her past, her present and her body separate; for the sake of Iris, her daughter, and for her husband, Harry, desperate to keep their lives and his tiny garden flourishing. But bodies are porous, unpredictable places . . .

Lia's story is told, in part, by the very thing that's killing her; a malevolent voice that wanders her systems, learning her life from the inside-out. The novel moves between her past and her present as we come to understand the people that have shaped this extraordinary woman: her difficult mother with her sharp bible tongue, never very good at loving Lia; her beloved daughter, Iris, navigating the last months of her childhood; her gentle husband, Harry; and troubled ex-lover, Matthew. In turn they each take up their place in the battle raging within Lia's body, at the centre of which dances the murderous narrator and a boy nicknamed ?Red'; the toxic chemo that is Lia's last hope.

But as Lia's condition worsens, the narrator inside her strengthens; the boundaries between her past, her present and her body begin to leak and spill.

Zusammenfassung

**Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize
Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize
Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

'Original, memorable, shimmering' - Sarah Moss'Restlessly inventive . . . delicate and persuasive' - The Guardian**

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.

When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia's world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you're simply not ready to let go?

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 astonishing debut is a symphonic journey through one woman's body: a wild and lyrical celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all.