The story is told from the first-person perspective of Gopi, the youngest of three daughters in a family dealing with the loss of their mother. Gopi’s narration is sparse, befitting a storyteller who is coming of age. Why do you think the author chose to tell the story from the perspective of an 11-year-old child - and how does it benefit the novel? Harding, an American, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2010 for his book Tinkers. His Booker shortlisted novel, This Other Eden, is inspired by the true story of an island off the coast of Maine, which became one of the first racially integrated communities in the American north-east. Judges said it was rare to “encounter a work of historical fiction that is at once so lyrical and so empathetic”. I write at my desk at home. 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.’

Much of the novel concerns what is unsaid. There are pauses, silences, gestures. Conversations are fragmented, or end almost before they’ve begun. What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters? 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? Drawing on the true story of the forced eviction of a mixed-race island community in New England before the first world war, it may have Edugyan’s vote but I think it’s a novel that’s hard to love. We follow various descendants of a freed slave as a well-meaning missionary, privately racist, attempts to spare one of them – a gifted young painter who happens to pass as white – by having him moved to a friend’s estate on shore. How to measure this against, say, the arrowlike flight of Maroo’s sentences aiming at the heart? I don’t envy the judges. Where they have by and large selected novels that show an uncomplicated faith in the pleasure of storytelling, Bernstein’s is the book that makes narrative a problem – the reader’s problem, some might say. But it just might be declared best on 26 November by judges who can’t be expected to spend a year agreeing with one another about how great The Bee Sting is. Hardik Pandya’s return to Mumbai Indians explained: Is there a transfer fee involved? How do trades work in IPL?A poignant illustration of the power of sports to help a family deal with grief—and each other—as they gradually make their way out of the darkness . . . [Maroo] is a marvelous and restrained storyteller.”

You can think it out, but in the end you don't know what is going to happen until you go through it." Prophet Song by Lynch, also Irish, was a “propulsive, unsparing and terribly moving” book warning of “the precarity of the democratic ideal”, the judges said. The novel, set in Dublin, is a dystopian tale of Ireland under a tyrannical government. Starting off as an intimate tone poem, this story of a squash-obsessed teenager expands into something with the amplitude, depth, and ringing power of a great symphony. In other words—WOW. Western Lane is glorious. You’ll want to read it over and over again.”

To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”. There is a parallel with the tight enclosure of the short novel. Maroo has a talent for making the space she needs for emotional complexity by way of physical description. “There was a sullenness about her,” she writes of eldest sister Mona, “a tightness in her muscles, and a refusal of ease or rhythm in her movement.” This conveys all the tensions – between care and resentment, responsibility and envy – that play out over the course of the story.

The winner receives GBP 50,000 and a trophy named 'Iris' in honour of the 1978 Booker Prize-winning Irish-British author Iris Murdoch. Their selection was made from 163 books published between October 2022 and September 2023 and submitted by publishers.In her mother’s absence, Gopi makes herself physical on the squash court. Gopi cares how her feet fall on the court, the curve of her arm through the air, how close she can keep to the “T”. 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”. 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”. They stay up late to watch the same video of the great Pakistani champion Jahangir Khan over and over again. These activities all explore aspects of Gopi’s grief. Maroo also takes it for granted, as Gopi does, that squash matters. Just as important to the novel, and just as vivid, is the almost inexpressible experience of a human body negotiating a transparent box, the heightened awareness that “Jahangir had for a situation, his sense for what was going on behind him”. No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of “Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition. Few novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion. Then, due to the fact the protagonist/narrator is an eleven-year-old Anglo-Indian girl, the prose is purposefully flat and unadorned. It reads just slightly more elevated than an elementary school reader - more reportage than anything. So I found much of the story plodding, due to the mundane style. Others have praised the view it gave into Indian family dynamics, but I have read such a plethora of Southeast Asian literature that it didn't seem necessarily novel or fresh to me.

youths arrested, car seized: Speeding luxury car rams into two-wheeler in Kolkata, 1 killed, 2 injured Plot-wise, too, this Booker Prize-longlisted debut is uncomplicated. A Gujarati immigrant family living in 1980s Britain silently struggles to cope with the death of their Ma, with squash filling those holes. The sport, which takes over the world of Gopi and her emotionally suffocated Pa, provides respite and distraction: each day Gopi practises at Western Lane, a sporting centre outside London, losing herself in her serves and becoming drawn to fellow player, 13-year-old Ged. The narrative alternates between past and present, court and home; while the court provides structure, it’s at home that Gopi, our narrator, observes the crumbling of her family, through subtle details from headaches to whispered conversations. From where I was sitting I could see the gulab jamun Aunt Ranjan had prepared early that same morning. The dark-golden balls of sponge were already soaked in sugar syrup and piled generously in a glass bowl at the end of the counter. This book took me by surprise. It dealt with the theme of grief in a different and understated way that I haven’t encountered in a novel before. It’s very easy for readers to not even know that’s what the book is even about.There is nothing hurried about squash. Watch Jahangir Khan between shots and it is as if he’s doing nothing. Maroo achieves something of this almost stillness, rhythmic quality and precision in her prose. Western Lane has a dreamy intensity . . . Gopi is steadily finding out what she can make of her feelings, of her life, of the people she meets and the heights she might aspire to."