Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

Lia, her husband Harry and their daughter Iris form a small, carefully balanced family. Iris is finding early adolescence hard going at school, and home is the place where she can rest. Then Lia receives a sudden diagnosis, and each of them is thrown off course.

As the illness takes hold, secrets from Lia's past surface in the present. The narrative moves back through time to the people who shaped her youth, among them her deeply religious mother and her troubled first love. Each of them leaves a mark on the shifting terrain of her body.

Part of the story is told by a narrator who lives inside that body: the voice of the disease itself. It is malevolent and gleeful, learns Lia's life from within, and grows bolder as the days pass.

This is literary fiction with a coming-of-age strand, built from several timelines and two kinds of voice. It swings between the domestic and the epic, and between comedy and grief, so the mood shifts often. Illness and death are central, and the tone is dark in places and light in others. The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Desmond Elliott Prize.