A knockout debut that turns boxing into pure art

232pp, Daunt, £9.99 (0808 196 6794)

Headshot is Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, and is set over the two days of an amateur boxing tournament for teenage girls, the “Daughters of America Cup”, in Reno, Nevada. It’s structured – like the tournament – into quarters, semis and final, the action of each fight forming the spine, but not the totality, of each section. As it begins, “Everything the coaches have taught the girls is in the past.”

This is a simple premise for an excellent book. Bullwinkel, a Whiting Award winner and now the editor of the estimable McSweeney’s Quarterly, is astute on the intimacy and trickery that occurs in the ring between boxers, their attempts to con opponents, find openings and play mindgames in order to land a punch. One fighter, she writes, “tried to live her life in as frightening a way as possible, dressing like a man and an animal” by adopting a “Daniel Boone-style raccoon hat”.

Each fighter has their own competing backstory and motivation, drawn with impressive sympathy. Most of the girls are searching for ways to be significant, to be the best at something – the tournament more a symptom than a target, the prize a measly substitute for higher aspirations: “The trophy is a small plastic-gold cup… affixed to a four-by-four plaqueless marble stand.” Cleverly, in a book that often draws on the symbolic language of elemental forces such as fire and flood, “there is no way that the Daughters of America Cup trophy would ever hold water. There is a slit in the cup where the plastic mould came together.”

Bullwinkel shows great skill at isolating the clinching details, from the elastic of the fighters’ shorts leaving small dents in their skin to – in one of the book’s many flashes-forward – the fact that one teenager’s fists “have been broken a dozen more times… When Artemis is 60, she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.”

There’s little glory here. The girls barely impress one another, and yearn for praise that’s no more forthcoming from the gym’s handful of spectators. Even the tournament is unlikely to linger in their memories: they will grow up and move on to other lives, leaving boxing a “failed identity marker”. But it does grant them, Bullwinkel suggests, a violent, and perpetual, sisterhood. If only for this single weekend, “the dusty air parts in front of each of them, like water parting for a god”.