When Lia had first been diagnosed, all those years ago, he often had to remind himself there was nothing coming for them. When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. It follows the last few months of Lia’s life–an illustrator in her forties married to university professor, Harry, and mother to precocious tweenage daughter, Iris. The adverts that shock with the statistic that one out of two will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetimes. Through breathtaking attention to detail, Mortimer crafts a stunning novel that touches on the expanses one life can contain.

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. Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness: And Other Writings on Life and Death (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992) 61.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?

Iris remembered staring at her shit in the toilet bowl after two weeks of beetroot, feeling superhuman. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, review: A bracing debut with a verve for life This novel is narrated by its protagonist’s cancer as it spreads through her body. It is important not to put gloves on, he would say, it is important to feel the soil, let the dirt get under your fingernails, you need to hear through tips of skin what it is the world wants.

But the absence of a thing will loom larger than its presence, and she felt His lack so personally, she began to wonder if there was something within her that repelled Him the way the rosemary kept the rabbits away, or the cinnamon sticks on the windowsill seemed to get rid of the ants. Delighting in my bare-feet-floorboard-creeps across from where she once would feed, down to where her body brews, I have sampled, splintered, leaked and chewed through tissue, nook, bone, crease and node so much, so well, so tough, now, that the place feels like my own.

The publisher’s press release includes a letter from Mortimer herself, outlining the book’s origins in personal experience and expressing a hope that readers will be'gentle'. Mortimer’s debut is actually a lot less experimental than it sounds, and it is also much more compelling and uplifting that one might expect. It featured Peter’s congregation in the process of pinning Lia’s own little body up above the church altar, like the pigs she saw hanging by their hind legs in the back of the village butcher’s, the pink cheeks of her bottom exposed, fleshy arms dangling above her blood-flushed face. The novel moves between her past and her present as we come to understand the people that have shaped her life.

She stretched her arm up, marked her mother’s forehead like a blessing, and then did the same to herself. This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman’s life—told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease. Lia’s father had been a graceful, amicable man, who kept his faith close always; he wrapped it about his body tightly so that it never snagged or frayed, tripped or slipped. The book is inspired by the experience of Mortimer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010, and the dynamics of this family under unthinkable strain are carefully rendered.