Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

De: Maddie Mortimer

Narrado por: Tamsin Greig, Lydia Wilson

Named a Best Book of 2022 by Time, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal

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

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.

©2022 Maddie Mortimer. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Macmillan Publishers International Limited. All rights reserved.

Read the actual book - word designs are created!

This is one that should be experienced on the page. The author uses word design and patterns to help express the poetry.

Absolutely gorgeous

This book was a gut punch in the best way. The prose was stunning and the structure was wildly bold, creative and ambitious. But what left me in tears was the raw, unfiltered, sometimes brutal and always profound love between mother and daughter. Just… wow.

Beautifully Poetic

The story is painfully beautiful and the way it’s told is poetic. A soul shifting book.

Breathtaking

Wow. So moved. I may just listen to this again for the language. The writing is so evocative and original. The theatre scene absolutely thrilling. Tamsin Grieg’s extraordinarily expressive reading, so carefully crafted. Lydia Wilson’s gentle consistency to return to. A wonderful pair for a book I will think about often.

Possibly my new favorite novel

If Virginia Woolf wrote books now, she would write something like this. It is cerebral and heart-rending.

Hard to relate

it may have been the tone of the reader on audible or just hearing instead of reading the creative sections from the body, but I was lost. and her ongoing dark perspective was depressing

Disjointed

Hard to track even with theaudio. I tried reading the first four chaperwe but switched to audio. Never bonded with the characters. Maybe book club will have me appreciating it more.