English novelist Mortimer's debut novel is a poetic story of a woman and the cancer that consumes her body. 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.

Harry was delivering a lecture on Ancient Greek Water Deities but was thinking about the freckles on Lia’s body.The adverts that shock with the statistic that one out of two will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetimes. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia’s body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day.

It was always so hard to come back from, so hard to warm the cool atmosphere that came rippling through the kitchen after one of her careless comments. 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. It all felt very futile, very vain, but then Iris had announced quite recently that vanity is just self-respect after Lia had suggested she take a break from staring in the mirror, and it had seemed very profound.There was hair, but it had grown back so tentatively, so undecidedly she almost wished it hadn’t at all. When Lia had first been diagnosed, all those years ago, he often had to remind himself there was nothing coming for them. As Mortimer reveals the romance from her protagonist’s youth, she crafts a kaleidoscopic narrative that is both a coming-of-age and end-of-life story. Outside the house, Harry watched Lia and Iris passing peacefully through the frame of the front window, eyes sore and glassy. Indeed, it’s in Mortimor’s eclectic font selection, in the width and the depth of her margins and breaks, in her choice of when the typeface is bold, and when it is not, that the utter horror of Lia’s joyful, unstoppable cancer is most effectively rendered.

There were new, obvious things that announced themselves now, like how vulnerable her mother had seemed, or how easily her father had dismissed them both. Pivoting between the domestic and the epic, the comic and the heart-breaking, this astonishing novel unearths the darkness and levity of one woman’s life to symphonic effect. Lia remembered the way he looked at the door as if he were a snake and the rain had just washed off a layer of his skin. While studying, Vida was diagnosed with Hypermobility Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue, conditions that render her frequently bed bound. It was then that Lia’s eyes latched to the car, turning the corner, coming quickly through the afternoon.

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.