Headshot is a short novel, tightly structured around a female youth boxing tournament, which takes place over a single weekend in Reno, Nevada. It follow’s the tournament’s eight participants through the tournament’s order of play, from the initial knockout matches, to the semi-finals and the final. Through each bout, we are transported back and forth in the boxers’ lives, in snippets that illuminate both their backgrounds and, more surprisingly perhaps, their future lives.

Western Lane follows Gopi, an 11-year old British-Indian Jain girl living in suburban London in the 1980s, who has recently lost her mother. Alongside her two older sisters, she is left in the care of her Pa, who is clearly also struggling with grief despite a seeming lack of emotional empathy and uncommunicative nature. Both Gopi and her Pa channel their grief into an obsession with squash, training at the titular Western Lane centre where Gopi meets Ged, a white boy with whom she becomes quietly infatuated, and his mother, with whom Pa finds a connection.