'WOW. Western Lane is glorious. You'll want to read it over and over again.' - Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger
A taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself.
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.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo's first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.
LONG-LISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 Chetna Maroo lives in London. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Western Lane is her first novel. A deeply moving exploration of an immigrant father's attempts to raise his family as a single parent, while consumed by his own grief and loss and struggling to recognize those of his children too.
