This is the best book about cancer I’ve read in a long time. That’s mainly because it’s not just a book about cancer. Unlike many others within the genre, Mortimer doesn’t portray a battle-narrative. There is no hero’s journey of a strong-willed protagonist against a body in revolt, or a personified evil to be vanquished. Instead it’s the story of Lia as a whole, and everything her body holds: memories, heartbreak, love, regrets, experiences; cancer being but one of them. Yes, it’s the story of a body’s annihilation, but only secondary to being about the life it has lived. Outside the hospital, Harry was waiting in the car park. Anne smiled politely at him and kissed Lia’s cheek, accidentally grazing the edge of her lip. Lia tried to pretend it wasn’t the most intimate moment they had shared in years. The book was chosen as the best debut of the year by a judging panel chaired by author and previous Desmond Elliott Prize winner, Derek Owusu. He was joined by journalist and author, Symeon Brown and the Programme & Commissions Manager for Cheltenham Literature Festival, Lyndsey Fineran.

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. But the most distinctive character is a first-person voice, which (at least at first) I interpreted as Lia’s long-dormant, now reappearing cancer and one which sets out to explore the interior contours, pathways, vessels and organs of her body. There the voice encounters the aggressive Red chemotherapy treatment sent to destroy the cancer and the group of those who are part of Lia’s past and present (who he sees as Yellow, The Gardener, The Dove, The Fossil and so on) which in turn leads to his exploration bringing long dormant memories to life. The central character Lia is largely inspired by Mortimer's mother, who died young after a long struggle with breast cancer, and cancer is obviously a dominant theme of the book. Despite this, Mortimer succeeds in making the book fresh, enjoyable to read and life affirming, and the language and style are extraordinary and innovative.Toxic masculinity is high among Mortimer’s concerns. The violent passion of Lia’s romance with Matthew is implicit in the description of her first kiss: “It is a remarkable thing that Lia’s senses did not rupture/there and then, that no one was harmed in the making/of the kiss.”

It had only been a year since they had pored over Iris’s Verbal Reasoning 11+ exercise books together. Spent hours labouring over paper that was so thin you could see straight into the next exercises. Iris remembered staring at her shit in the toilet bowl after two weeks of beetroot, feeling superhuman. 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. Rather paradoxically, and maybe even troublingly, I felt closer to, more intimate with, the cancer taking possession of Lia’s body than I did Lia. The third-person narration of Lia’s story, split between the present-day fallout from her diagnosis and her adolescent goings-on at a pastoral English vicarage twenty-plus years previous, is traditional, almost old-fashioned, clipped. The first-person voice of Lia’s cancer, on the other hand (really it’s inaccurate to call it ‘Lia’s cancer’: there’s a primal, ancient, omnipotent, uncontainable edge to it), is gleeful, jokerish, charismatic; Lewis Carol’s Cheshire Cat welcoming the carnage wrought by its cellular cousins. The cancer is at least one step ahead of Lia at all times and, therefore, so are we, the readers. In a remarkable moment of dramatic irony, we find out the cancer is in Lia’s brain before she’s told ‘ It’s in your brain. Here’ and then ‘ It’s everywhere’ by her oncologist (255).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.

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 debut is a symphonic journey through one woman’s body: a celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all. The feet are incredible things…. each ligament is connected to a very specific part of your body …. Daisy Johnson, Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything, Under Compelling and uplifting . . . undeniably impressive: Mortimer is clearly a talent to watch

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. 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. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies marks Maddie Mortimer as a major new literary voice’– Lyndsey Fineran

Lia’s mother’s faith had a life of its own. It was huge, inscrutable. It entered rooms before she did, often announcing her arrival, and then obstructing everyone else from moving about. 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’. Mortimer’s debut has been selected as the best first novel published in the UK and Ireland this year from a strong shortlist of three, which also featured Iron Annie by Luke Cassidy and Keeping the House by Tice Cin. 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. Despite the violence of her bible tongue and the crippling silent codes she shrouded every inch of their lives in, for those five seconds, with slices of stained window light behind her, she was the saintliest thing in the world.

Should the disembodied voice be interpreted as a personification of cancer? On the one hand, it explains with relish that “when pain replaces the proteins in [Lia’s] skin […] I’m in”. On the other hand, it knows a lot of trivia – about subjects ranging from Sex and the City to the nerve endings in the human clitoris, to female campers in Yellowstone national park – and makes very human, very lyrical pronouncements, such as that the cello is “the wisest instrument”. The Early Career Awards portfolio also includes the University of East Anglia (UEA) New Forms Award for an innovative and daring new voice in fiction, and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship, which recognises an exceptional writer who has experienced limiting circumstances or is currently underrepresented in literary fiction. And it is from these two, rather experimental, narrative threads that the book was initially woven.