Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel, some of which was written - between shifts in a vintage clothing outlet - in the Foyles bookshop cafe in London. Foyles commissioned Mortimer to write a personal blog about her work, in which she says: 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. About the author When Lia got home, Iris was curled up like a question mark in her very yellow room doing physics homework. Lia asked if she needed any help. She shook her head as if it was unlikely Lia could be of any –

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 LamplightersNobody notices a thing, because Yellow is explaining loudly how to conduct a successful search party, and those of the chorus with feet and/or hands are lacing their boots and/or hitching their pistols, and Dove is muttering prayers under her bird-breath while The Gardener is eyeing up Red the way one man might size up another leaning a little too close to his wife at closing time, all while Red is simply itching to burn. And so, it is only I who sees this stranger, lurking in the periphery, prowling near her spine the way spirits haunt staircases. It was no surprise, then, that when the doctor announced the cancer had spread, Lia felt a stirring in her stomach. This deep-vowelled how? like a wolf’s cry. The doctor searched her eyes sadly and nodded, ever so slightly, as if he were agreeing with the churning stomach sound, how how howing away at the body’s betrayal. 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.

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. It’s my favourite elbow ever, she said, very quietly, and Lia wished she hadn’t, for the only thing that made her stomach ache more than the ease of Iris’s brutality was her stunning self-awareness. At twelve years old, she was, perhaps, the wisest person The 2021 Desmond Elliott prize was awarded to AK Blakemore for The Manningtree Witches, a historical novel about Essex witch trials in the 17th century. Previous winners include Lisa McInerney, Preti Taneja and Francis Spufford.he can’t say a word. Can’t make a sound. 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. Either way, I do what anyone with a sense of humour would and I ahahahahaha! right into his petrified face. Anne had insisted she be there. She had accompanied Lia to her chemotherapy sessions a few times before, and Lia was convinced Anne had decided hospitals were safe, perhaps even ideal environments for Mothers Making Amends. It was the fact of their being supervised by nurses, perhaps. Restricted by noise regulations. Rooted to the place, immovable, through the drip in Lia’s arm. Lia was trying not to feel pleased to see her. Iris remembered staring at her shit in the toilet bowl after two weeks of beetroot, feeling superhuman. Her writing has featured in The Times and her short films have screened at festivals around the world. She is co-writing a TV series currently in development with Various Artists Ltd. In 2019 she completed the Faber Academy Writing a Novel course.Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is her first novel. Judge Tom Gatti on Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies His name was Matthew and her parents had argued about letting him in. He was a boy really, straddling the awkward space between childhood and manhood, growing out of himself. Lia remembered the way he looked at the door as if he were a snake and the rain had just washed off a layer of his skin.

Mortimer perfectly developed her characters. None of them are saints, and she didn’t lean on cliches to carry Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. Really this description only touches the surface of a novel which is all about what goes on underneath that surface (both literally and figuratively – although the very distinction between literal and figurative, physical and mental, experience and memory is one the book implicitly rejects). ha ha ha we got inside you, we got inside you — and we’ll eat your stomach - eat you out from the inside out …. There were shopkeepers and teachers and nurses and dentists, dads in IT with computers for hands, a mum drowning in bank notes, another with a spade potting small flowers with faces on. Daisy Johnson, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything, Under Compelling and uplifting . . . undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch

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. 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. So that for example the voice increasingly becomes part of Lia. And there is a remarkable scene with Lia and family attending a dance performance where the voice choreographs the set of internal characters (Yellow etc) on the exterior stage. Mortimer received her BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Her writing has featured in the Times and her short films have screened at festivals around the world. She is co-writing a TV series currently in development with Various Artists Ltd. In 2019, she completed the Faber Academy Writing a Novel course. Sunday Times Here is a book to dance and sing about. An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic dive into language 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, author of The Mercies

As Lia faces death, she is heavy with regret and guilt, and she also thinks of Matthew, the man she did not marry. Nevertheless, she finds solace in her loving relationship with her daughter. For Mortimer, her debut novel is also an elegy for her dead mother, to whom she was very close. As a writer, she had processed her cancer in columns. And she left the family diaries, the contents of which led Mortimer to the central theme of her novel: Mortimer certainly deserves praise for inventiveness, but her approach isn’t entirely without precedent. Over the years, we have already met all manner of unlikely narrators. Remember Nutshell (2016), Ian McEwan’s re-working of Hamlet as told by an unborn foetus? Jenny Diski’s Like Mother (1988), meanwhile, was narrated by a baby born without a brain. In My Name is Red (1998), Orhan Pamuk utilised a whole chorus of strange narrators, from a severed head, a tree, a gold coin, and even the colour crimson. And Markus Zusak went all in when he decided to have the grim reaper himself narrate The Book Thief (2005).

On the way home, Anne blushed at the thought of their lips touching, at the fact of Harry having witnessed it. She felt it must have looked grotesque. Desperate. She would not be so careless again. What I think is most impressive about the book is that put all the experimentation to one side and this would still be a deeply thoughtful book about the human condition with a complex and involving plot and a series of fully realised characters. There was a silence. It was that particular stuffed silence full of the winning of something. Then Peter was opening the kitchen door, ignoring the eavesdropping Lia and welcoming the stranger in with apologies, questions, suggestions of tea. Lia heard her mother sigh and shuffle quietly over to the kettle, spitting a final squashed and caged,