I had never considered how much of the game unfolds in that hollow pop, or how much of my profession depended on that lonely sound. Soon Gopi discovers a talent that draws the attention of Ged, the son of the club’s white manager, who becomes her training partner; and Maqsud, a Pakistani businessman and avid squash player who convinces Pa to enter his daughter into a tournament. My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way. Recently a friend asked me if the book has something of the detective story about it, with Gopi trying to find her way, piecing together the clues of small gestures, actions and fragments of overheard conversations; she has little to go on and since she’s dealing with the mysteries of loss, there are no answers for her. And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout.

When she's on the court, she feels more connected to her father and connects with Ged, who also excels playing squash. Booklist also reviewed the novel, [9] as well the audiobook, noting that "London actor [Maya] Saroya is a gentle, measured cipher, moving seamlessly between the crisper British English of the sisters and their contemporaries and the more lyrical South Asian accents of the older generation. What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief? The sisters have always spoken Gujarati, their mother tongue, but not well enough to converse easily with their own mother, and so when she was alive the girls had learned to read her body and to communicate by being physical in her presence. With Pa, she spends hours “ghosting”, which means playing with something crucial missing – the ball – in a practice that seems more significant “than a rehearsal or drill”.

Before the tournament, Mona spends money she’s earned herself on a new racket for her youngest sister. In the aftermath of their mother’s death, a strangulated silence envelops the house Gopi shares with her older sisters, Mona and Khush.

Chetna Maroo’s debut novel begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi and her two older sisters in the care of their father. Pa is outwardly positive, but Gopi reads his “eyes and body”: “He was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him.The tension is heightened by squash-obsessed, emotionally uncommunicative Pa; fearful Aunt Ranjan is the obstacle that stands in Gopi’s way. I usually try to get each sentence and paragraph sounding right before I go on, reading and editing from the beginning of the story.

She becomes aware that Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan, who have no children of their own, want her to live with them in Edinburgh.

When Gopi occasionally remembers something about her mother, it is visceral – watching Wimbledon while eating strawberries with sugar. What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters?

After their increasingly strenuous training sessions, he and Gopi spend hours watching videos of the legendary athlete Jahangir Kahn and his rivals Geoff Hunt and Hiddy Jahan.She loves listening to the “sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard”, which has an echo “louder than the shot itself”. Cautioned by a concerned relative to find a healthy outlet for his daughters, Pa turns the family’s casual weekly squash game at a local sports center into daily, determined training sessions. As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another. Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.