Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

This is a fairly painful novel to read, and I say that not as a cancer survivor, but as a reader, and one who does not routinely shy away from painful subjects. It is the author's debut novel, and it was long listed for the Booker prize, so that in itself is an accomplishment. The story follows the last few months of Lia’s life. She is an illustrator in her forties married to university professor, Harry, and mother to precocious tweenage daughter, Iris. Lia is dying of breast cancer. She had it once before, years ago as a very young woman, and now it’s come back. During the course of the book, the cancer spreads from organ to organ and eventually it breaches her brain. Despite this, there is very little about treatment in the book. Lia doesn't go on countless trips to the hospital or overhear tough, too real, conversations about hospice care. There are only glimpses of those typical cancer scenes: the short sharp sting of a cold cap, the red violence of the intravenous chemo drug, doxorubicin. Even the news that the cancer has recurred is told minimally, sparingly, as if it were an unimportant detail, anything but central to the arc. The grappling with her past and her present is what drives the story line, and it is unique and inventive in that way.