This striking novel takes a formally inventive approach to a woman’s terminal-cancer diagnosis... Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy, and Mortimer asks readers to think about death as something that 'does not happen in the first or third person, but in the second.'" — The New Yorker 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 condition worsens, while Iris is still determined to live her pre-teenage years fully. In turn, Lia’s mother, Anne, comes to terms not only with her daughter’s illness but her own shortcomings, finding that hospitals are “ideal environments for Mothers Making Amends”. Because this is a remarkable book which combines a fresh voice and literary (as well as typographical) experimentation with a central idea which is universal (but I think seldom covered in fiction), resonant themes, and with a deep maturity in its empathetic understanding of people’s bodies and mind.

In Intoxicated by My Illness, a collection of essays about dying from cancer, the New York Times’ critic Anatole Broyard quipped that ‘Being ill and dying is largely, to a great degree, a matter of style’. [1] In Maps of Our Specular Bodies, Mortimer ably captures an experience of cancer specifically, and the experience of terminal illness more generally, by treating dying and death in line with Broyard’s ‘matter of style’–a style which can only be realised through a radical exploration of form. Indeed, it’s in Mortimor’s eclectic font selection, in the width and the depth of her margins and breaks, in her choice of when the typeface is bold, and when it is not, that the utter horror of Lia’s joyful, unstoppable cancer is most effectively rendered. Word by word, cell by cell, we watch as the book, the body, is broken down and turned into something else. Lia knew what her father would say next. He would use bible tongue. Her mother would go silent, and he would win. Because here is a fact: you can’t beat bible tongue. Lia often thought of this time. Thought of Iris sitting in hospital waiting chairs with her tiny legs dangling down,

Judge Tom Gatti on Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

So how would the fight begin? Would there be some warning, some sign that it had started? A horn? A quaking-gallop-humdrum on the horizon, From an early age, Lia is made to feel suspicious of her body. She grows up in a vicarage, where the flesh that matters belongs to Christ. When she is 12, her parents, Anne and Peter, take in an adolescent boy, Matthew. Anne and Peter grow to love Matthew. So does Lia – but in a different way. The young man is heading for ordination, Anne and Peter believe, unaware of what goes on in Lia’s bedroom. Lia liked this phase more. It felt grown-up. Bold. She drew Yellow often as the fluid intangible thing that it was, sometimes a blot of gold light, a sharp buttercup tongue, a smudge of a small girl hiding in a streetlamp. All the codes around the house became yellow; the Wi-Fi, the house alarm. Lia would lace out yellow word-talks at night, discuss its pigment-science and etymology; Ah. Here. You can tell the ones that mean the most because they are more than gabble-panic fragments or faceless voices. For example:

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About the author

When Iris was seven, her teacher asked everyone to write down what their parents’ jobs were and also suggested they drew a picture as a Creative Exercise. Peter shifted uncomfortably, as if he were overhearing an argument taking place loudly in another room. He moved softly towards the sliced tomatoes on the counter, contemplating them, for a second, before walking out the kitchen door.

It all felt very futile, very vain, but then Iris had announced quite recently that vanity is just self-respect after Lia had suggested she take a break from staring in the mirror, and it had seemed very profound. Fineran said the novel was a “standout read” in a “very strong list”. Brown added: “It’s an incredibly inventive and, at times, genius novel, seamlessly blending competing values from science and religion to bluntness and subtlety.”There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’ Lia’s story is told, in part, by the very thing that’s killing her; a malevolent voice that wanders her systems, learning her from the inside-out. The novel moves between her past and her present as we come to understand the people that have shaped her life.