Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

By: Maddie Mortimer

Narrated by: 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.

Critic reviews

"Lydia Wilson and Tamsin Greig deliver complementary performances to tell the story of Lia, a British woman whose cancer has just come out of remission. Wilson narrates the sections of the novel from Lia’s perspective, jumping back and forth from Lia’s adolescence when she was growing up the daughter of a minister to the present when she is battling her cancer once again. Between Lia’s sections, Greig performs interludes from the perspective of Lia’s cancer, perfectly capturing the disease’s wry narrative voice as it remarks on the changes in Lia’s body. Wilson and Geig’s two performances work in harmony, giving listeners an emotionally intimate listening experience."

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.