Welcome to Litsy!

It is a surprising and charming story about grief and family. I enjoyed it. 3 🌟 #womensprizeforfiction

A coming of age novel about the loss of a mother to not only the three girls in the family, but also to their father. The protagonist and her father become obsessed with her playing squash as a channel to dealing with their grief.

I found this to be a novel of wonderful rhythmic hypnotic prose. It took me a few sittings, but I found myself swept up in Gopi's world of grief and squash.

It‘s unassuming, on a grieving family of Jains in England. After Ma dies, dad gets his three daughters into squash, and one of them really takes to it, embracing the sounds and rhythms of the play and the game flow and its strategies.

This finishes the #Booker2023 longlist for me

This book was beautifully written. Haunting. The intergenerational and intercultural dynamics were welcome. Not entirely happy ending. But hopeful

My next book. I finished The Sound and the Fury tonight and started this. It‘s my last left from the #Booker2023 longlist.

We meet Gopi in the aftermath of losing her mother. She's the youngest of 3 girls and Dad, in his quiet way, isn't coping. No one in this family is dealing with their grief.

Grief and loss open up massive spaces and Gopi fills her space by playing Squash at Western Lane every day.

This is a short book at less than 200 pages but I feel like it needs a good edit. I like what this book is trying to communicate but the execution falls flat.

6th book read from the Women‘s Prize for fiction-long list
😬Sorry this one didn‘t work for me. I‘m not a fan of novels about sport even though the story has other topics. I wasn‘t interested in the story and I couldn‘t believe so decision made. 2.5/3⭐️

Moving one-sitting read. I liked it, but not nearly as much as the other two #WomensPrize titles I‘ve read (Ordinary Human Failings and Brotherless Night).

Was this a victim of overhype? Should I have read a print copy rather than listening to the audiobook? I‘m not sure but I feel like whatever the multiple nominating committees of various prizes found in this I missed. I appreciated the way squash takes center stage but otherwise was disconnected from the characters.