Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies cover art

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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About this listen

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.

 Coming of Age Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Medical Women's Fiction Heartfelt Thought-Provoking Tear-jerking

Critic reviews

Remarkable . . . A tearjerker, but it's hopeful too . . . Brave, inventive and mature
Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language (Daisy Johnson, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything, Under)
Compelling and uplifting . . . undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch
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)
Lyrical and beautiful, this is a novel unlike anything else
Both expansive and intimate, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is an intricate portrait of a life hurtling towards the inevitable. An extraordinary debut. (Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Mercies)
Striking . . . formally inventive . . . Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy
A beautiful novel about death that feels completely alive, pulsing with tenderness and wit (Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From and The Harpy)
An extraordinary debut, unlike anything I've read. Wildly inventive, poetic and poignant, this is a rare gem of a novel that took my imagination to new places and touched my heart. (Emma Stonex, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamplighters)

Technically dazzling . . . Mortimer has the same felicity with language as Jon McGregor, combining an incantatory prose style with imagery so acute it almost burns
Ambitious, sprawling . . . brings to mind Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing . . . restlessly inventive . . . delicate and persuasive . . . sharply funny
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
This is a touching, eye-opening perspective on life and illness like you've never read before
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
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
All stars
Most relevant
It was fine. I liked some parts but not others.

The prose was well written with some thought provoking observations and substance packed into the writing.

I found myself engaged and interested in Lea's past, but not in her present. I just didn't really care about the progress of her disease and its impact on her and her family.
I was not emotionally invested at all.
Which is really, really strange tbh. Not just because there's a young woman losing the battle against her own body, leaving a flowering child and a beautiful, kind husband in her wake, but because I WAS that precocious 12 yr old who's mother was taken by that very same monster. I usually can't watch or read anything even remotely alluding to such a circumstance without being in floods of tears.
This book though - Not even a sniffle.

Perhaps it's partly due to the fact that I just did not understand the personification of all the..... concepts? Presumably because I'm autistic af. I originally thought I was following the story - I thought it was the tumor talking.
But then she appeared to be there before cancer was ever an issue? Was she the gene mutation?? Was she the first cell division error? What was she???!!
And how was she manipulating and influencing the sea and other people and other external factors??
And then who taf were "Yellow" and "Dove" etc..???
I'm sure it's all beautifully symbolic etc etc but as I said, I'm too autistic for this sh..


Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

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I hate it. and I love it. how much I know that I understand this book because I have been there, next to bodies like this. the pain of truth ... and this story it is true ... it is life at its most spectacular, the love the flaws the body in all its splendour, all its complexity, all its horror and heroism.

the language bus breathtaking, the structure a literary act of genius and the story. oh my GOD

Absolutely fucking fabulous

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Absolutely loved this recording. It is so alive and engrossing. It lives on in your mind long after it has finished.

Riveting

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Wonderful writing and beautiful read. A sad and up lifting tail longing back on a life while living with cancer.

Beautifully written

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As a printed book, this title makes liberal use of typographical features to generate meanings in addition to what the words themselves say: text is shaped into pictures (e.g. a dove), undulates along the page, is given unusual spacing, put into different fonts and font sizes, and generally exploited as another semantic resource. Audio can't do that, obviously, so the recording here opts to have two (both fantastic) actors, who voice the bold-face type (Greig) and the rest (Wilson). Occasionally Grieg paces her delivery to reflect odd layout, but most of the typographical differentiations found in the visual/physical book are lost.

Those wanting to listen without a hard copy should, however, feel confident in doing so. Virtually nothing missing from the audio here makes the book incomprehensible. The dual voices in fact render some of the parts where internal and external speakers dialogue much more readily and immediately understandable. If I were being unkind, I might argue that the qualities of the audio here point to the lack of necessity, perhaps even redundancy, in the strange visual features of the book, which I would imagine some readers might find rather off-putting. They perhaps unnecessarily over-complicate a visual reading experience in a way that the audio reading cuts right through.

Dual narration works well

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