Maddie Mortimer

This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman’s life—told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease. Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform. Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. 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. 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.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Bilge Ince

Try and survive for as long as you can try and survive for as long as you can.

I don’t know. Maybe a brown. Or a purple-grey. 

Iris looked up to the ceiling and laughed one of her wide-open golden laughs and said, No no no, you’re just saying that because you’re old. Old people can be bright too.

It is a shame, such a shame, Harry thought, that to be a human is to be one thing, to be contained, to have these walls of skin and a singular sense of self that sloshes and slaps around the inside of us like water on the inside of a well.

It sounds like a secret word for the shape the moon makes on still water.

Anthimeria is also the verbing of a noun. From the Greek 'anti' - against, opposite 'meros' - part, it is a leap, a transformation, a conversion from Thing to Action; where we box away, crane up, curtain through the certainty of what things are and what they could be. 

The way light moons about on a flat plate of sea.

The only thing worse than death is knowledge of coming.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies quotes

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