Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

The 2023 Booker longlist. A multifaceted, poetic, and in many ways experimental text, complemented by free verse, poems, facts about the human body, and articles where words dance, break off, fold into pictures, and scatter like fireworks. The novel “Maps of Our Wonderful Bodies” is devoted to the theme of cancer. It’s literally a journey through the life of the heroine, Lia—told partly in the voice of her illness. We learn about Lia’s childhood, her difficult relationship with her parents, first love, her creative path, the birth of a daughter, her first encounter with the disease, and her final reconciliation with it. Maddy Mortimer’s unique style and a special sense of humor make this story both heartbreaking and life-affirming at the same time. A devastating, yet at once darkly funny novel. Mortimer penetrated the body and spirit of literature by taking experience familiar to many of us and making it completely unique. Somewhere between the everyday and the epic, between comic and melancholic.