Headshot is a novel by Rita Bullwinkel published in 2024, long listed for the Booker Prize. The action takes place over two days at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno Nevada, where the eight best under-eighteen girl boxers in America take part in the Daughters of America Cup.

Already my description is a bit off, which reflects how tricky this novel is to pin down. It’s not really confined to two days. The disembodied narrative spins off into past and future. We find out about the competitors’ childhoods and later lives.

This is a book about boxing. The girls are clearly defined as individual combatants. But the book really gets interesting in using boxing as an unexpected metaphor for togetherness, and feminine togetherness at that. Boxing is a sport where you look your opponent in the eye. There is no sense of running your own race in boxing. You are in it with your opponent. From that sense of robust sharing, there is a comprehensive breaking down of demarcations, categories, individuality, to explore a shared experience. Boxing is paralleled with girls’ clapping games, hair braiding. It’s cleverly done, using a tough sporting event in a grubby boxing venue to explore the boxers’ lives, and then life in general as a battle that is also, somehow, a collaboration.

I came out of the book with an odd feeling of reassurance that people’s endless capacity to fight is combined with an endless capacity to work together. In the wider boxing match of life, which all the girls have come from and will return to, there is the same opportunity. I admired the book. It is both a challenging punch in the eye with its originality, while still capable of putting a friendly arm around your shoulder. Rita Bullwinkel is a professor of literature at Leipzig University – and maybe this sense of challenge combined with collaborative help is a good one to describe teaching. I hope I was a good student in this boxing class.