Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.

But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie is up to his armpits in debt and increasingly preoccupied with preparing for an apocalypse that may or may not be just around the corner. His wife, Imelda, has become invisible to everyone except Big Mike, a man with unsavory local connections and a long-running feud with her husband. Their teenage daughter, Cass, always at the top of her class, has started drinking and staying out late, though nobody seems to have noticed. And twelve-year-old PJ is spending more and more time online, talking to a really funny, friendly kid called Darryl who never has his camera on and wants PJ to run away from home.