It was the first time either of them had ever mentioned death out loud. That crawling, colourless word. It seemed to move between them like a changeling; unfamiliar, restless, new. Both doctor and Wikipedia said: when breast cancer spread to the lungs or liver it could be treated but could not be cured. It was no surprise, then, that when the doctor announced the cancer had spread, Lia felt a stirring in her stomach. This deep-vowelled how? like a wolf’s cry. The doctor searched her eyes sadly and nodded, ever so slightly, as if he were agreeing with the churning stomach sound, how how howing away at the body’s betrayal.

He also had the gift of prophecy granted to him by his father, which meant he knew the nature of Truth but would only ever reveal it if he was captured and squeezed into his real original state – She imagined the horror of walking over, leaning down with the rest of the rats, pushing the girl’s hair gently off her face, to find that it was Iris, her Iris, her eyes stripped clean of their life. 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? Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language."— Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters 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.The 2021 Desmond Elliott prize was awarded to AK Blakemore for The Manningtree Witches, a historical novel about Essex witch trials in the 17th century. Previous winners include Lisa McInerney, Preti Taneja and Francis Spufford.

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. A coming of age story, at the end of a life. 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:It might take them a while to acclimatize. I want to tell them to pinch their smudged noses, feel the pressure in their blotched ears swell and burst, let their eyes adjust to the colour of fight, the fragment vernacular of breath and nerve and strips of limb, arteriole streams cuts ducts pipes and dreams.

Maddie Mortimer was born in London in 1996 and received her BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Her writing has featured in The Times, her short films have screened at festivals around the world and, in 2019, she completed the Faber Academy Writing a Novel course. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel, published by Picador on 31 st March, 2022. Lia’s mother buys a book about cancer, which she then struggles to read as it is too advanced for her, meant instead for students of science. “But she was trying, at least,” she thinks, “trying to understand what was happening to her daughter’s body.” Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is Mortimer’s own attempt to try to understand what happens to an ailing, invaded body; to make some narrative sense out of an otherwise illogical, shattering experience. The novel is dedicated to her own mother, the television producer and writer Katie Pearson, who died of cancer in 2010.

Table of Contents

He reminds me of shadows lengthening from the edge of the frame, an accidental constellation, a preservation, a taunt, a secret history, very Mary Shelley, or grim late-night telly. He moves