Atlas unserer spektakulären Körper

Atlas unserer spektakulären Körper (the German edition of Maddie Mortimer's Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies) follows a woman confronting terminal cancer, telling her story alongside a second, uncanny narrator: the illness itself, moving through her body and her memories.

The novel is formally inventive — shifting fonts, fragmented stanzas, lists, and playful redefinitions arrange themselves on the page to mirror the disintegration and reassembly of a life under threat. It is, at once, a coming-of-age-at-the-end-of-a-life story and a meditation on desire, forgiveness, and the darker corners of family relationships, inspired in part by the author's own experience of losing her mother to cancer.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, it is a demanding but rewarding read for anyone drawn to formally experimental literary fiction.