Anne was watching a large ant crawl down the edge of the kitchen sink, its plump body slick and shiny as black cherry skin. Lia is dying while she’s living, her past, present and future a glorious cacophony of voices, from the webs of words that bind her to her daughter, to the mutating cancer that is an inexorable part of her self. 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. The sensation of something buried very deep had gone charging up through her lining, and she had found herself churning out the contents of her stomach over his large nimble fingers, between her own small toes.

Oh my God, a telephone voice rasped loudly by her ear, but before she could get a closer look, the scene had flooded with people, all gnawing, clawing away at the prospect of a massacre, quick as starving rats to sudden crumbs. The book has flashes between Lia’s present life with her fabulous husband Harry and wonderful daughter Iris, Lia’s past life, and the voice of her illness. For all its rich agility, I am not sure it has quite got the polish to make it on to the Booker shortlist, but who knows.Lia was crouched in her fortress at the end of the garden and Anne examined her daughter’s posture for a while, wondering how long it would take for her scalp to burn. The judges, said Owusu, went “back and forth for days after the winner was due”, but ultimately decided on Mortimer’s book feeling “confident that we would be assisting with, and bearing witness to, the launching of a new and spectacular talent”.

This was manageable, she thought, as she turned the cold tap and swilled the insect down the drain with her fingers.Mortimer certainly deserves praise for inventiveness, but her approach isn’t entirely without precedent. So here was a new man in front of them with this younger face, black emperor eyes, and something very uncomfortably confident about the way he twitch-sniffed his nose before he answered a question, like he was gathering drips of Important Information at the back of his mouth, relishing in the new tastes of life-death data. Round and round it went as the hours rung on, the rhythms and notes folding over each other like spells that could cure, that sore something, rising and rattling in awful interludes.