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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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In bed that night, stuffed on one third of each pudding, Harry stroked the milky middle of Lia’s arm, the bit that stayed the same colour and texture no matter how old she got. Lia could feel his fear through his fingertips, the caution and worry in his touch as he mumbled more battle phrases and she watched them charge him, accidentally, into sleep. With the weight of her body deepening into the mattress and an acute awareness of her own heartbeat thrumming under her chest, Lia reached out for the pen next to her bed. She opened the folds of her notebook and there, on her side, with her cheek pressed to the pillow and her hand quivering out in front of her, she wrote until she slept:

She asked the nurses how this could possibly happen when surely he had VIP access to all of the most sought-after, tried and tested, tumour-blitzing drugs, and they raised their eyebrows and said it did not really work like that. Knowing something inside out does not make you immune to its power. Lia thought of difficult mothers and books she’d read a thousand times that still made her cry and thought, yes, this seemed very true. Harry was the most capable person Lia had ever met. It was hard to know what to make of pure human goodness like his, for her life had been so littered with people who bounced effortlessly between extremes, and she had come to expect a certain degree of difficulty. 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.)Today I might trace the rungs of her larynx or tap at her trachea like the bones of a xylophone or cook up or undo some great horrors of my own because here is the thing about bodies: they are impossibly easy to prowl, without anyone suspecting a thing.” Lia sat on the end of her bed and drew out the shape of his language; the hills, the bends, the steady dips of it: This was one of the few good things about having a vicar for a father – one could not easily turn away homeless strangers. It would not reflect well on the Church. Her coat hung limply on the corner of the door like some stuffed and sorry scarecrow, skewered deep into its sacred patch of land, waving away the world. Mortimer: "I was kind of fascinated with this idea of this like young girl waiting around for God. This idea that God to her is defined by His absence, the same way that Matthew, the boy who arrives at this vicarage and ends up becoming the great love of her life, he throughout her life is more absent than present. And so her relationship with God an her relationship with Matthew are kind of intrinsic, I see him as God anthropomorphized almost."

Sunday Times Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language Not quite a noble steed, but a great mustard beast of a bike, which blazes its own spun hymn of chain against metal, and will no doubt serve devilish Red as well as Gringolet served Gawain, or Arion served Adrastus, or Marengo served Napoleon.Go and brush your teeth, she said, only her voice crumbled a little at the brush, so that she sounded very feeble. It had never come naturally to her. Motherhood. This act of pulling days out from one’s sleeve. But she tried, most mornings, to find little delights where her own mother had failed to look. To never let Iris feel the joyless tedium of it all the way she had when she was young. What are you doing waiting there for? she said, leaping into Lia’s arms, and Lia felt the street hold its breath, the swelling of its surfaces, the gradual muffle of its parking cars and sycamores. 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. It had only been a year since they had pored over Iris’s Verbal Reasoning 11+ exercise books together. Spent hours labouring over paper that was so thin you could see straight into the next exercises. 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.

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