Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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To my left is a wardrobe, to my right above my desk the exhibition poster from the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Tove Jansson retrospective, showing Moomintroll standing in an open window looking out into the dark.

The language barrier meant they “pulled at her, pushed into her, made ourselves physical in her presence”. 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.

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.

At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. 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”. 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. Before the tournament, Mona spends money she’s earned herself on a new racket for her youngest sister. I have to trust that the work will benefit in the end from the rhythm and slow quality of this attention.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. I don’t know what makes these books endure in my mind, but maybe in part it is the feeling of having genuinely encountered the private world of another person, a sensibility – the narrator’s or the author’s, perhaps both. To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”.

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”. What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief? Whenever she felt adrift during her writing, she would revisit that opening page, which she considered a steadfast anchor for her creative orientation.Taking a break and immersing herself in various readings ultimately led to a significant breakthrough. And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. 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.