Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

By: Maddie Mortimer

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Synopsis: 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.