מאת Maddie Mortimer
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize
Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
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.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize
Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
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.
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Lydia Wilson and Tamsin Greig deliver complementary performances to tell the story of Lia, a British woman whose cancer has just come out of remission. Wilson narrates the sections of the novel from Lia's perspective, jumping back and forth from Lia's adolescence when she was growing up the daughter of a minister to the present when she is battling her cancer once again. Between Lia's sections, Greig performs interludes from the perspective of Lia's cancer, perfectly capturing the disease's wry narrative voice as it remarks on the changes in Lia's body. Wilson and Geig's two performances work in harmony, giving listeners an emotionally intimate listening experience. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
- Sunday Times Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language
- Daisy Johnson, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything, Under An original and memorable novel written in shimmering prose. The characters stayed with me long after I'd finished reading
- Sarah Moss, Women's Prize-shortlisted author of Ghost Wall and Summerwater A beautiful novel about death that feels completely alive, pulsing with tenderness and wit
- Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Mercies Remarkable . . . A tearjerker, but it's hopeful too . . . Brave, inventive and mature
- Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From and The Harpy Lyrical and beautiful, this is a novel unlike anything else
- Emma Stonex, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamplighters Striking . . . formally inventive . . . Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy
- i newspaper It may move between different styles and moods, but underpinning it all is the book's bursting energy and, in the face of death, its verve for life
- Good Housekeeping This is a touching, eye-opening perspective on life and illness like you've never read before
- Booklist (starred) Using word placement, font, and shape to create images on the page, Mortimer deepens the reader's engagement with the story and characters . . . Through breathtaking attention to detail, Mortimer crafts a stunning novel that touches on the expanses one life can contain
- Straits Times Maddie Mortimer's dazzling debut novel about a woman with breast cancer is a life-affirming read - all the more so because of its proximity to death . . . While there are many books that explore these themes, it is rare to find one that does so in such an immersive and harrowing way
