Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You got a wrong foot approach there, Troot," called the orphan Joe Wear. What he meant: usually a left-handed bowler makes her last step with her right foot; Bertha Truitt bowled and stepped with her whole left side. It shouldn't have worked. She knocked down six pins. Joe gave a low whistle and Jeptha Arrison echoed it, like birdcall, a nervous avian declaration.

"Thanks, Joe," Truitt said lightly, to the pins—Joe wouldn't have been able to hear her—then turned to look at her team. Like Nora Riker, she wanted to win. She just wanted to win everything of all time.

The invention of a sport: here is a ball, now throw it through that net, if those other guys'll let you. Here is a bat: somebody's going to throw a ball at you and you knock it away and run, if those other guys'll let you. Here is a tiny ball and a stick and out of view beyond that grassy hill is a ball-size hole: you figure it out.

Here is a ball. Heft it in your hand. Nobody's going to stop you. Some man might call out with advice, too much advice, but in the end it's your game to play and your game to win.

Bertha Truitt picked up the second ball of the frame and tested the weight in her hand, a little toss, then brought it up and touched just the plump underside of her chin with just the cool curve at the top of the ball. She looked at how the pins lay, four standing, interlaced with the dead wood. Then she bowled.

The ball knocked over three more pins, and Joe Wear whistled again, lower, graver. He came over to watch; he stood behind the women, who sat on the rush-seated benches as though at church. LuEtta Mood asked, over her shoulder, "Is that good?" In the dark of the alley her hair shone like polished brass. It irked Joe Wear.

"I'd say so."

In those days to knock down nine pins in candlepin bowling was a feat, no matter your age or sex or waistline. The balls were smaller, the pins narrower, the approaches not oiled or even varnished, just rough fricative wood.

The third ball knocked over the last pin. "Ten box!" said Joe Wear.

Jeptha Arrison dropped down to the wood to reset, fetched the balls and bowled them back along the return, started resetting the pins on their metal deck.

"Good roll, Troot!" he called. "A real good one."

"All right, pinbody," she called back fondly. Nobody had a more interesting head than Jeptha. "Set 'em up."

The women watched Bertha Truitt bowl an entire game till they fell into the rhythm. You set your brain to bowling time and got caught up in the serial nature of it. Three balls a frame, ten frames a string. They hadn't realized that bowling was so full of suspense. A story: our hero (the ball) sets out on his journey (the approach), travels the length of his world until he runs into trouble, acquits himself well or badly, end of chapter.

Turn the page!

The only pause was at the end of every frame, when Jeptha Arrison jumped down to pluck the balls from the pit, then set the pins back up on the plate.

"Seventy-seven!" Joe Wear called out when Bertha had finished her first string.

"No thank you, Joe!" Bertha Truitt called back. "No score, thank you!"

Well, that was like a woman, wasn't it. No score.

What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed. If they were allowed a small measure of it, they had to forsake love. She forsook nothing.

Cemetery Matters

Of course she was looking for somebody in particular. She looked for him in the hospital—he was a doctor—and as she built the alley, and as she rode her bicycle along the streets of Salford. She had built a building and put her name on the front as advertising. Naturally she went to the cemetery, where they had first met, and looked for him there. All of the details were not clear in even Bertha's mind, though she remembered the cold of the cemetery and the decision to lie down, to open her coat to let in the chill like a guest. Some days she could conjure up the whole Bertha-shaped stretch of the cemetery where she'd lain and think of it with affection. Her birthplace, in a way. No need to reflect upon what had come before. She'd been found. Marching forward had always been her habit. Only in a bowling alley did back and forth get you anywhere.

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.