Harry never used to think awful things like this. The image floated to the electric bit at the very top of his brain and vanished. One can train awful thoughts to perform acts of all kinds, Harry thought, even vanishing acts. Lia did not know the extent of these thoughts, the extent to which they unravelled her husband. They had got steadily worse over the years and he knew it had a lot to do with this seeing Lia as a body, He also had the gift of prophecy granted to him by his father, which meant he knew the nature of Truth but would only ever reveal it if he was captured and squeezed into his real original state – To scream is to flood just as much as it is to whisper, and brave is certainly to laugh just as it is to beat. And maybe, in a world where fish is to run and bird is to slide, I would still have my breasts.

All of this captured not just through an often poetic prose shot through with cultural reference, and with an active exploration of words and meaning, but in a fluid and varying typography – starting with the use of bold and italics as signifiers of voice, but incorporating varying font sizes and then even non standard text orientation. What I think is most impressive about the book is that put all the experimentation to one side and this would still be a deeply thoughtful book about the human condition with a complex and involving plot and a series of fully realised characters. he can’t say a word. Can’t make a sound. And it must be something to do with the way her body has been forced to forget or digest him, or perhaps it’s simply the fact that being a fossil for too long can really weigh on a man; the mud and silt and sadness must get all up and into your voice box. Either way, I do what anyone with a sense of humour would and I ahahahahaha! right into his petrified face. Feeling brews itself in different locations, depending on the body. A man’s most honest impulses may begin in his hands or his heart, his toes, throat, fingers or thighs. Lia felt most things first in her stomach.

Lia lay awake with her eyes closed. Feeling death’s breath on her face, his probing chubby fingers playing with her eyelashes, she listed off yellow things to keep afloat: Iris remembered staring at her shit in the toilet bowl after two weeks of beetroot, feeling superhuman. There are two main strands of the story - a fairly straight omniscient third person narration of the family story, and more poetic and mysterious bold text in which a voice is given to the cancer cells as they explore Lia's body and her thoughts. There was a silence. It was that particular stuffed silence full of the winning of something. Then Peter was opening the kitchen door, ignoring the eavesdropping Lia and welcoming the stranger in with apologies, questions, suggestions of tea. Lia heard her mother sigh and shuffle quietly over to the kettle, spitting a final squashed and caged, Perhaps because I already knew about the unique character- voice: Cancer — and a mother dying — entangled with mother/daughter issues - before I started listening I was able to keep some distance from the gut- wrenching sadness.

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. With Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Maddie Mortimer has penetrated the body and spirit of literature, taking an experience, one familiar to so many of us, and making it completely unique. The experimentation with language, form and ideas, offers us something that is precious and personal to each writer: human truth. It’s a courageous feat, and one executed with the wisdom of a sagacious observer. Maddie Mortimer's ambitious debut novel tells the story of Lia, who is diagnosed with cancer for a second time - this time she is going to die, leaving behind her husband and young daughter. The author, whose own mother died of breast cancer when she was 14, sensitively shows how family members experience the road to death - but what renders the text so striking is that the aesthetic implementation is particularly innovative. Mortimer experiments with questions of body perception and how they can be translated into literature. While the family story is told in the third person, a first-person voice guides the reader through the inside of Lia's body. every other person that has ever lived just quietly pass on through them at some time or another. I find this thought surprisingly moving. Dribble had started to leak from the corner of Anne’s lip, beginning a glistening journey down the hard line on her chin. It was funny, funny watching the person that once governed your life look such a fool. Lia wondered if she’d ever really forgive her. She focused on the stalk of spit, willing it to keep going, wilt down onto the grey cardigan, trying not to think about how the freezing felt.

Lia’s mother buys a book about cancer, which she then struggles to read as it is too advanced for her, meant instead for students of science. “But she was trying, at least,” she thinks, “trying to understand what was happening to her daughter’s body.” Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is Mortimer’s own attempt to try to understand what happens to an ailing, invaded body; to make some narrative sense out of an otherwise illogical, shattering experience. The novel is dedicated to her own mother, the television producer and writer Katie Pearson, who died of cancer in 2010. Anne spoke quietly, respectfully, of new curtains and a holiday planned for March. Lia nodded along. Their eyes fell for a moment on the liquid red drip, the silence like a burning prayer. Lia has only one child, Iris; her magical, awkward, endlessly creative daughter who has just entered the battleground of her teenage years. Lia and Iris have always been close, but there is a war playing out inside Lia’s body, too, and everything is about to change. As she confronts what might be the end, memories of her own childhood and a passionate love affair come rushing into her present, unearthing buried secrets and her family’s deepest fears. But Lia still has hope . . . for more time, for more love, for more Iris. 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.