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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

By: Maddie Mortimer
Narrated by: Lydia Wilson, Tamsin Greig
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About this listen

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize

Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize

Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia’s body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It’s travelling down the banks of her canals. It’s spreading.

When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia’s world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you’re simply not ready to let go?

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story of coming-of-age at the end of a life. Utterly heart-breaking yet darkly funny, Maddie Mortimer’s astonishing debut is a symphonic journey through one woman’s body: a wild and lyrical celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all.

©2022 Macmillan Publishers International Limited (P)2022 Macmillan Publishers International Limited Coming of Age Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Heartfelt Thought-Provoking Tear-jerking

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Critic reviews

"Original, memorable, shimmering." (Sarah Moss)

"Extraordinary, kaleidoscopic." (Daisy Johnson)

"Restlessly inventive...delicate and persuasive." (The Guardian)
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A beautiful study of life and death but ultimately the very human experience of loss and of the grief it brings.

Beautiful

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Stunning audio book. I think it deserves a second listen or read the physical copy of the book because it is so thought provoking. The narration was perfect. Definitely one my favourite audiobooks so far.

Engaging and reflective

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Absolutely loved this recording. It is so alive and engrossing. It lives on in your mind long after it has finished.

Riveting

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Wonderful writing and beautiful read. A sad and up lifting tail longing back on a life while living with cancer.

Beautifully written

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It was fine. I liked some parts but not others.

The prose was well written with some thought provoking observations and substance packed into the writing.

I found myself engaged and interested in Lea's past, but not in her present. I just didn't really care about the progress of her disease and its impact on her and her family.
I was not emotionally invested at all.
Which is really, really strange tbh. Not just because there's a young woman losing the battle against her own body, leaving a flowering child and a beautiful, kind husband in her wake, but because I WAS that precocious 12 yr old who's mother was taken by that very same monster. I usually can't watch or read anything even remotely alluding to such a circumstance without being in floods of tears.
This book though - Not even a sniffle.

Perhaps it's partly due to the fact that I just did not understand the personification of all the..... concepts? Presumably because I'm autistic af. I originally thought I was following the story - I thought it was the tumor talking.
But then she appeared to be there before cancer was ever an issue? Was she the gene mutation?? Was she the first cell division error? What was she???!!
And how was she manipulating and influencing the sea and other people and other external factors??
And then who taf were "Yellow" and "Dove" etc..???
I'm sure it's all beautifully symbolic etc etc but as I said, I'm too autistic for this sh..


Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

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Maps of our Spectacular Bodies charts life, love and death.

From coming to age to end of life brilliant new author Maddie Mortimer takes us on an unforgettable journey.

Highly original and compelling in her writing style using stream of consciousness, humour, encyclopaedic facts and beautiful prose to chart the journey of a life and those close to her.

Highly recommended!

A beautiful book

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I thought this audible book was absolutely mesmerising. Can’t recommend highly enough. Superb writing and the performance of the two readers was as I say mesmerising.

LOVED THIS BOOK

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absolutely loved this book, moving, gripping, a really special book and great narrators too

brillliant listen

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the book is great and the audio voice feels appropriate in tone. But its very annoying and difficult to manage thar the volume is constantly shifting up and down from one moment to the next. one second its barely audible mubling so you turn it up, and the next it feels like it's shouting at you. I know change in volume can help with the storytelling, but this was just impractical and difficult to listen to a lot of the time. it took me a good bit longer to finish because I had to keep rewinding in casw the parts I couldn't hear more than a whisper of mumbling were important.
it's a really nice book outside this issue, but it's difficult not to let that spoil the story to a degree.

Frustrating change in volume constantly

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As a printed book, this title makes liberal use of typographical features to generate meanings in addition to what the words themselves say: text is shaped into pictures (e.g. a dove), undulates along the page, is given unusual spacing, put into different fonts and font sizes, and generally exploited as another semantic resource. Audio can't do that, obviously, so the recording here opts to have two (both fantastic) actors, who voice the bold-face type (Greig) and the rest (Wilson). Occasionally Grieg paces her delivery to reflect odd layout, but most of the typographical differentiations found in the visual/physical book are lost.

Those wanting to listen without a hard copy should, however, feel confident in doing so. Virtually nothing missing from the audio here makes the book incomprehensible. The dual voices in fact render some of the parts where internal and external speakers dialogue much more readily and immediately understandable. If I were being unkind, I might argue that the qualities of the audio here point to the lack of necessity, perhaps even redundancy, in the strange visual features of the book, which I would imagine some readers might find rather off-putting. They perhaps unnecessarily over-complicate a visual reading experience in a way that the audio reading cuts right through.

Dual narration works well

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