Longlisted for the International Booker 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.

Today I might trace the rungs of her larynx or tap at her trachea like the bones of a xylophone or cook up or undo some great horrors of my own because here is the thing about bodies: they are impossibly easy to prowl, without anyone suspecting a thing. Until, of course, they do. And then, of course, they aren’t. When Lia finds out that her cancer is back, she tries to keep the landscapes of her past, her present and her body separate. But bodies are porous, unpredictable places. Lia’s story is told, in part, by the very thing that is killing her; a gleeful and malevolent voice that shape-shifts through her systems, learning her life from the inside-out. We come to understand the people that have shaped her: a daughter, navigating the horrors of the playground; a husband, struggling to maintain a sense of self as everything falls apart; a regretful mother making up for lost time; and a troubled former lover who belongs to Lia's past, but won't stay there. In turn they each take up their place in the changing landscape of Lia’s body, at the centre of which dances our restless narrator and a boy nicknamed ‘Red’; the chemotherapy that is Lia’s last hope. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story of coming-of-age at the end of a life – a heartbreaking tale of desire, love and forgiveness, a wild and fierce journey through one woman’s body.