Mortimer, M: Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia‘s body. It‘s learning her life from the inside. 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. This is Lia‘s story. From the perspective of the thing that‘s killing her. When Lia finds out that her cancer is back, she tries to keep the landscapes of her past, her present and her body separate; for the sake of Iris, her daughter, and for her husband, Harry, desperate to keep their lives and his tiny garden flourishing. But bodies are porous, unpredictable places . . . Lia‘s story is told, in part, by the very thing that‘s killing her; a malevolent voice that wanders her systems, learning her life from the inside-out. The novel moves between her past and her present as we come to understand the people that have shaped this extraordinary woman: her difficult mother with her sharp bible tongue, never very good at loving Lia; her beloved daughter, Iris, navigating the last months of her childhood; her gentle husband, Harry; and troubled ex-lover, Matthew. In turn they each take up their place in the battle raging within Lia‘s body, at the centre of which dances the murderous narrator and a boy nicknamed ?Red‘; the toxic chemo that is Lia‘s last hope. But as Lia‘s condition worsens, the narrator inside her strengthens; the boundaries between her past, her present and her body begin to leak and spill.