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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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These gruesome images had soon planted themselves in her dreams, dreams that she would present proudly the next morning at the kitchen table. 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. 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 Lamplighters 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.

Something gleeful and malign is moving in Lia’s body. It shape-shifts down the banks of her canals, leaks through her tissue, nooks and nodes. It taps her trachea like the bones of a xylophone. It’s spreading. 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.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

Lia was crouched in her fortress at the end of the garden and Anne examined her daughter’s posture for a while, wondering how long it would take for her scalp to burn. Not long, she thought, under the strength of this maddening sun. Her scalp would burn, and then it would peel, and it would be a lesson. Overall, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a deeply moving novel with unexpected twists, written in a style that I haven’t seen before, a treasure, haunting, lingering. It was a stupid idea. The book was too advanced for her; too advanced, she was sure, for a student of science. But she was trying, at least trying, to understand what was happening to her daughter's body. 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”.

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 fossil forehead, the chips in his cheeks, and tries and tries to speak, and all the while I’m laughing and laughing and thinking –

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. Lia’s first bid for escape is a forbidden and ultimately toxic teenage romance with an older boy who is an acolyte of her father, but it is not until she leaves home that she finally manages to begin living life on her own terms. Opening her university acceptance letter is a sensory experience, unleashing the “burnt tomorrow scent” of freedom into the air. The feet are incredible things…. each ligament is connected to a very specific part of your body …. Nobody 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.She had made a song for the cold cap chemo hours. To remedy the boredom, the strange, relentless pain. Lia and Iris often made songs. This was not one of their best; they’d just rewritten the words to ‘Daisy Bell’ with its marriages and carriages and looking sweet on a bicycle seat. It had been hummed so frequently by Lia’s father that its tune had etched itself This book is definitely sad so if you like sad stories, you might want to give this a go. Also, this book really reminded me of The Book Thief which has the narrator as the voice of death. So if you enjoyed the style of The Book Thief, you might want to try Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies. Round and round it went as the hours rung on, the rhythms and notes folding over each other like spells that could cure, that sore something, rising and rattling in awful interludes. 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. My aunt has it my dad had it my grandma my neighbour my dog my babysitter’s boyfriend’s mum has it.

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