When Lia had first been diagnosed, all those years ago, he often had to remind himself there was nothing coming for them. While Lia’s family pin their hopes on chemotherapy treatment in the present, the cancer gleefully unpicks Lia’s past: the arrival of the older, beguiling Matthew in the vicarage where Lia is raised upends the course of her life, and she veers into an off-kilter relationship – one, the cancer insists, that has “done just as much damage as I have”.

Harry was delivering a lecture on Ancient Greek Water Deities but was thinking about the freckles on Lia’s body. Then Peter was opening the kitchen door, ignoring the eavesdropping Lia and welcoming the stranger in with apologies, questions, suggestions of tea.

It all felt very futile, very vain, but then Iris had announced quite recently that vanity is just self-respect after Lia had suggested she take a break from staring in the mirror, and it had seemed very profound. Minutes later, Iris came bounding down the road with the world on her back, her cheeks flushed with the excitement of the day. Lia thought of difficult mothers and books she’d read a thousand times that still made her cry and thought, yes, this seemed very true. And it must be something to do with the way her body has been forced to forget or digest him, or perhaps it’s simply the fact that being a fossil for too long can really weigh on a man; the mud and silt and sadness must get all up and into your voice box.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is around 433 pages (at least according to this version of the Advanced Reader Copy), and I think it is a touch too long. As she confronts what might be the end, memories of her own childhood and a passionate love affair come rushing into her present, unearthing buried secrets and her family’s deepest fears. She could feel it; the new chill in the air, the slowing of the clouds, the dizzying shift of atmosphere when tragedy drops into an ordinary day like this. And so, it is only I who sees this stranger, lurking in the periphery, prowling near her spine the way spirits haunt staircases. Owusu said that Mortimer had “penetrated the body and spirit of literature, taking an experience, one familiar to so many of us, and making it unique”.While studying, Vida was diagnosed with Hypermobility Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue, conditions that render her frequently bed bound. How unusual, Anne said, adjusting her body in the seat, hoping the exchange had reached an acceptable conclusion. She would never take a chemistry exam or fall in love or know what a particularly nasty UTI feels like; she would never go to Manchester to study medicine, never become a medic or get to save any lives, and perhaps there would be other people that would die in years to come because of this very moment, because a man with matte skin had made a break for it and a young girl in a blue school uniform who knew things about elements had darted out into a road too soon, and Lia had watched all the glittering possibilities of her life flare up and flicker out, just like that. When it was Iris’s turn to present her work to the class, she stood and held the sheet of paper up proudly. As Mortimer reveals the romance from her protagonist’s youth, she crafts a kaleidoscopic narrative that is both a coming-of-age and end-of-life story.

Lia shares the spotlight with “I, itch of ink, think of thing”, an impish, verbose and mysterious narrator that appears to be neither human nor nonhuman. The young man is heading for ordination, Anne and Peter believe, unaware of what goes on in Lia’s bedroom.She took a deep, heavy breath in through her nose, concentrating on the stretch of her ribs, the widening of her chest, and held it. On the one hand, it explains with relish that “when pain replaces the proteins in [Lia’s] skin […] I’m in”. The disorienting experience of this technique brings to mind Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, another novel that stretches conventional language to address terminal illness.