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.

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. We are delighted to announce Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador) by Maddie Mortimer as the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022.But once in a while there is nothing better than connecting deeply with intellectual-one-of-a- kind intrigue. 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 Longlisted for the Booker Prize · Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize · Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize · Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize · Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Prize Mortimer perfectly developed her characters. None of them are saints, and she didn’t lean on cliches to carry Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies.

What are you doing waiting there for? she said, leaping into Lia’s arms, and Lia felt the street hold its breath, the swelling of its surfaces, the gradual muffle of its parking cars and sycamores.

Judge Tom Gatti on Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’ In writing that teeters between poetry and prose, this mischievous being revels in pop culture references, from ET to Abba. A grim twist on “Knowing Me, Knowing You” is typical of the novel’s punchy, unapologetic humour. There will be family here. Friends new and old. Preserved. Untold. There will be half-drawn thoughts and dream-props and fragments of people she has passed in shops and they are all currently following the Smell of Starts to Stomach, where her instinct brews and wafts its stench.

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. 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. 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.”

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. I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize and I have to say up front that a debut novelist, and in particular one in her mid-20s, simply has no right to write a book this good. The girl was dead. She knew it. She could feel it; the new chill in the air, the slowing of the clouds, the dizzying shift of atmosphere when tragedy drops into an ordinary day like this. The crowd seemed to be multiplying and all Lia could think was – Yes. It’s an interactive language learning book. Supposed to encourage creative thinking. That sort of thing.