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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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The book — a lyrical exploration of one woman’s body and the illness that inhabits it — was described by judges as a ‘precious and personal’ work from a ‘new and spectacular talent’. Go and brush your teeth, she said, only her voice crumbled a little at the brush, so that she sounded very feeble.

If one could just throw tumours up, find them like coins in mud, polish and frame them next to the art in the kitchen. She imagined the horror of walking over, leaning down with the rest of the rats, pushing the girl’s hair gently off her face, to find that it was Iris, her Iris, her eyes stripped clean of their life. Both doctor and Wikipedia said: when breast cancer spread to the lungs or liver it could be treated but could not be cured. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy ( Your California Privacy Rights) and Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.It was awarded to Cate West who trained in Fine Art and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2019. The other key human characters are: Lia’s husband Harry (a University lecturer with a hobby as a Gardener); her mother Anne, now widowed after the death of her high-Anglican and deeply faithful Parish-Priest husband Peter and whose relationship with the rebellious Amelia has always been marked by mutual judgement and suspicion and who now elderly (and scrawny pigeon or generously Dove-like in appearance) struggles with how to deal with, as well as make theological sense of, her daughter’s illness; Matthew – how came to the Vicarage as a waif and stray when he was 15 and Lia 11, and who was effectively adopted as something of a (to Lia) preferred prodigal by Anne and Peter, before becoming an on-off lover of Lia for many years (starting when she was just 15) but who now is something of a Fossil-ised memory for her. 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. 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 .

So many things could have been possible in Lia’s past if she had the kind of vanity, the kind of confidence that Iris had. She never felt Him there, in the combed barley fields or the huge patchwork valleys that blanketed the land before them. That evening, they knelt by the foot of Lia’s bed and prayed together, palms pressed tightly together, the thick weave of the carpet patterning bare knees. Lia had never felt so conscious of her own appearance, of how she might look to him, standing close to the door, listening to the argument growing in the kitchen.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. There was hair, but it had grown back so tentatively, so undecidedly she almost wished it hadn’t at all. She inhales around thirteen pints of air a day and exhales billions and billions of molecules of oxygen in a moment. Through breathtaking attention to detail, Mortimer crafts a stunning novel that touches on the expanses one life can contain.

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