Soon Pa is neglecting his job as an electrician and turning a blind eye to his family’s financial troubles, not to mention their emotional ones.

How does it feel to be nominated for the Booker Prize 2023, and what would winning the prize mean to you - especially as one of several debut novelists on the longlist? This was just the rhythm of life as she experienced it as a child, inside this family dealing with loss. I didn’t have a plot or outline for the whole novel, but I had a sense that the story would turn on this one question: would Pa bring himself to let one of his daughters go?Language is hampered by stammers and cultural barricades as well as by things too scary and distressing to sound out.

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. To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”. They stay up late to watch the same video of the great Pakistani champion Jahangir Khan over and over again. 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. 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.

I usually try to get each sentence and paragraph sounding right before I go on, reading and editing from the beginning of the story. Though I played squash for many years and the game is still vivid in my imagination I don’t know where the connection with this grieving family came from, but I trusted it. Whenever she felt adrift during her writing, she would revisit that opening page, which she considered a steadfast anchor for her creative orientation. 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”.