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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies was inspired by Mortimer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010, and focuses on the character of Lia and the shapeshifting cancer inside her body. Moving between Lia’s past and present, the book is a look at memory, mother-daughter relationships, and coming to terms with death. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a beautiful novel about death that feels completely alive, pulsing with tenderness and wit." — Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From Maddie Mortimer was born in London in 1996. She received her BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Anne was wearing the same grey cardigan she wore for special days like Palm Sunday or the Pentecost. She had meant this thoughtfully, but it just made everything feel monumental and sombre. A final slow injection. A clear liquid disappearing inside. The most unnatural of sensations; the kind so severe it forces you to dissociate entirely from your body’s substance,

She leant her head lightly against Lia’s arm for a moment, before reaching down to dip her finger in the yellow paint. She stretched her arm up, marked her mother’s forehead like a blessing, and then did the same to herself. Lia smiled sadly, and they both continued to paint with their matching triangle forehead tattoos and their individual rollers pushing, coating, sponging harder with every stroke as if they could erase all the facts and start again. Ah. Here. You can tell the ones that mean the most because they are more than gabble-panic fragments or faceless voices. For example: for all the play and ‘fizz’ there were also simple delights that emerged unexpectedly along the way. I learnt that a fully realised character or frank, honest dialogue can be just as poetic as a perfectly constructed metaphor, or a bit of clever word play. This, I think, is growing up. It’s realising that you have nothing to prove. It’s leaving your coat and scarf and pretension in the hall, taking the hands of your characters, and letting them lead you through the house. My soul got stretched- nourished, and (this isn’t meant to sound morbid) but I even feel a little more prepared for my own death —Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022, longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize

I'm glad I listened to the audiobook because it was superbly narrated by Tamsin Greig and Lydia Wilson who were phenomenal. Their reading emphasized the text's musicality and playfulness. Apparently, this is also one of those novels that play with typography, paragraphs and images. I'm a fan. Mortimer perfectly developed her characters. None of them are saints, and she didn’t lean on cliches to carry Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. For instance, one of the main characters of this novel is cancer who interjects now and then and whose voice is in a bold typeset. (I need to get me a copy, besides, it's got such a beautiful cover and the title is superb.)Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language."— Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies marks Maddie Mortimer as a major new literary voice’– Lyndsey Fineran Toxic masculinity is high among Mortimer’s concerns. The violent passion of Lia’s romance with Matthew is implicit in the description of her first kiss: “It is a remarkable thing that Lia’s senses did not rupture/there and then, that no one was harmed in the making/of the kiss.”

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