Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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When they spoke of this evening much later in their lives, Matthew remembered her having said Lia very confidently, looking him dead in the eyes straight through his brain into the tick of his mind. She had gone to the stairs and observed the strange scene playing out, sliding down a few steps to try and catch what was being said. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform.

And it must be something to do with the way her body has been forced to forget or digest him, or perhaps it’s simply the fact that being a fossil for too long can really weigh on a man; the mud and silt and sadness must get all up and into your voice box. Even the news that the cancer has recurred is told minimally, sparingly, as if it were an unimportant detail, anything but central to the arc. Lia had never felt so conscious of her own appearance, of how she might look to him, standing close to the door, listening to the argument growing in the kitchen. It was the sort of weather that got into her sinuses, crawled beneath her lids, made her certain the effort of finding her daughter a hat and going to place it on her head to prevent the inevitable burning was not worth a minute of sneezing. Drying between each of her fingers with a paper towel, she stared down at the veins that, with age and illness, had risen from the back of her hands like trembling blue roads on a map.

This was one of the few good things about having a vicar for a father – one could not easily turn away homeless strangers.

He hadn’t flinched or grimaced, but had simply dipped his hands back into the bucket of water and sponged off the sick from her feet.And so, it is only I who sees this stranger, lurking in the periphery, prowling near her spine the way spirits haunt staircases. 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. The book has flashes between Lia’s present life with her fabulous husband Harry and wonderful daughter Iris, Lia’s past life, and the voice of her illness. You’ll re-read passages like pulling a song back to its start, wanting to evoke and experience those chills, or be enlightened again and again. Overall, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a deeply moving novel with unexpected twists, written in a style that I haven’t seen before, a treasure, haunting, lingering.

Pivoting between the domestic and the epic, the comic and the heart-breaking, this astonishing novel unearths the darkness and levity of one woman’s life to symphonic effect.She leant her head lightly against Lia’s arm for a moment, before reaching down to dip her finger in the yellow paint. 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. 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.

So if you enjoyed the style of The Book Thief, you might want to try Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. 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. Mortimer certainly deserves praise for inventiveness, but her approach isn’t entirely without precedent. Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love.Moving between Lia’s past and present, the book is a look at memory, mother-daughter relationships, and coming to terms with death. Mortimer was announced as the winner of the prize, which is given for a debut novel published in the UK and Ireland, at a ceremony in London this evening. And increasingly the various already porous barriers in the book: the past and the present; the exterior and the interior; Lia’s body and thoughts and the almost constant presence in them of the cancer – largely disappear. Lia noticed the girl had thick straight lashes that interlaced as she blinked and a profile of rare, youthful prettiness, the kind that stood out amongst the mass of waiting faces, growing impatient at the crossing, and it was always so hard, she thought – so hard not to get distracted by beautiful things.