Read an excerpt from the Pulitzer-finalist HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel!
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs.
An electrifying debut novel about the radical intimacy of physical competition. Read an excerpt here:
RACHEL DORICKO
vs.
KATE HEFFER
‘Perhaps the future will not be like the past,’ said Rachel Doricko, to no one in particular. Rachel Doricko had watched Artemis Victor destroy Andi Taylor. Rachel had stood with her arms crossed, watching from a corner. Rachel Doricko had thought that the ring looked like it had a sag in the middle of it until she got into the ring herself and was facing Kate Heffer, and it looked to Rachel now, sitting on a stool with her glove-clad hands in the corner, with her knees spread as wide as they could go, that the dead centre of the ring was a mound that might have one million bugs in it that, if you punctured it, would explode.
‘I’m a toaster,’ said Rachel, loud enough that the people in the crowd could hear her. Her mouth guard was in her right hand. She was hitting the top of her thigh with her fist, which had her mouth guard clenched in its grip.
Rachel had a theory about other humans: people are the most scared by what makes zero sense to them but that they cannot, no matter how they try, avoid. Because of this, Rachel tried to live her life in as frightening a way as possible, dressing like a man and an animal. She had a Daniel Boone–style raccoon hat that she wore everywhere, which worked quite well. It is amazing the power that a strange hat will give you.
And Kate Heffer was the perfect person on which to deploy the logic of the weird hat. Kate Heffer was definitely upset by weird hats. Rachel Doricko wished she could wear her weird hat now and spin it around so that the raccoon tail was in the front and she could put it in her mouth and chew on its rotten, tattered hide while staring at Kate Heffer from across this small expanse of a ring.
Rachel put her mouth guard in and banged her fists against her headgear. Kate Heffer looked at the gym, and the other girls in it, at the men referees, and the men coaches and the men judges and their sad paunches, and the few parents scattered about, applauding for something, applauding for anything, clapping seemingly only to applaud that the young women doing the fighting had bodies and could use their bodies for certain things, anything, really, which included boxing, which, to most of the parents, seemed like a funny coincidence, if nothing else.
It was midmorning and everyone had crossed that point in the day when they looked more awake than asleep and it seemed that the light in the gym was getting louder and louder and that here, in Reno, it would continue to get brighter and that this was just the tip.
Rachel Doricko and Kate Heffer had greater differences than the difference of their bodies. They each perceived time and understood the importance of their own lives in radically different ways.
Headshot
by Rita Bullwinkel
‘Explosive’ Guardian
‘An absolute knock-out . . . Excellent’ Daily Telegraph
‘An ambitious, exciting debut. You emerge from it sweaty, pummelled and ready for your next fight’ Times
‘A knock-out . . . Headshot feels like the complete deal in a way we rarely see in debut fiction: efficient, forceful, just messy enough to be interesting and leaving space in the ring for the reader’ Observer
‘A Knockout debut novel ... Exhilarating’ Spectator
‘Compelling’ Daily Mail
‘Insightful, bold and accomplished, Headshot is also heartfelt’ Times Literary Supplement