de Chetna Maroo
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024
Longlisted for the William Hill Award 2023
A BBC Arts & The Reading Agency's Big Sporting Read selection
Selected by Dua Lipa as one of Service95's 'Books of the Year'
'A beautiful and evocative novel about grief, about growing up, about losing and winning. The people and places in this book will stay with me for a long time.' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
A deeply moving novel about grief, sisterhood and a teenage girl'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 unforgettable coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo's Western Lane is an exploration of the closeness of sisterhood, the immigrant experience, and the collective overcoming of grief.
A 'Book of the Year' in The Economist, The Independent, The Week, The New York Times and The Guardian
'With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.' – The Times
'Stunning . . . Spare, tender, brilliantly achieved . . . A novel that unfolds in silences . . . and dares to leave much unsaid.' – The Guardian
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024
Longlisted for the William Hill Award 2023
A BBC Arts & The Reading Agency's Big Sporting Read selection
Selected by Dua Lipa as one of Service95's 'Books of the Year'
'A beautiful and evocative novel about grief, about growing up, about losing and winning. The people and places in this book will stay with me for a long time.' – Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
A deeply moving novel about grief, sisterhood and a teenage girl'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 unforgettable coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo's Western Lane is an exploration of the closeness of sisterhood, the immigrant experience, and the collective overcoming of grief.
A 'Book of the Year' in The Economist, The Independent, The Week, The New York Times and The Guardian
'With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.' – The Times
'Stunning . . . Spare, tender, brilliantly achieved . . . A novel that unfolds in silences . . . and dares to leave much unsaid.' – The Guardian
Critiques-
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November 28, 2022
In Maroo’s compact and powerful debut, the members of a grieving Jain family dedicate their lives to squash in late-1980s England. After Gopi, Khush, and Mona’s mother dies, their father decides to transform the family’s casual weekly games into an intense training program. Gopi, the youngest at 11, quickly becomes the best competitor of the trio, and when not at school or Gujarati class, she studies videos of matches and hones her game in the courts at an athletic center called Western Lane, eventually practicing against Ged, the white 13-year-old son of an employee there. The pair catch the eye of Maqsud, a Pakistani man who urges them to register for an upcoming tournament. Gopi steps up her training, falling for Ged in the process. Meanwhile, Mona, 15, takes on household duties, and the grieving Khush, 13, prefers to speak in their mother’s favored Gujarati. With Gopi’s fluid narration, Maroo skillfully balances the drama of Gopi’s upcoming squash tournament with the nuances of family drama, describing, for instance, how their father’s encounters with Ged’s mother differ from his “way with Ma or our aunties or any of the women we knew.” This will invigorate readers. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. - The Guardian A deeply evocative debut about a family grappling with grief, conveyed through crystalline language
- The Judges of the Booker Prize Starting off as an intimate tone poem, this story of a squash-obsessed teenager expands into something with the amplitude, depth, and ringing power of a great symphony. In other words—WOW. Western Lane is glorious. You'll want to read it over and over again.
- The Economist [A] slim, subtle, moving story . . . about grief and growing up in a Gujarati family in Britain . . . A bold book [and] a quietly brilliant one.
- The New York Times Chetna Maroo captures with great poignancy and accuracy the bewilderment and groping for meaning that loss brings—but also how small acts of kindness ultimately redeem us from this loss. Truly a gem of a novel, this deceptively simple story told in a sparse, elegant style kept revealing its depths long after I had closed its pages.
- Wall Street Journal Lean, agile, and quietly deadly, Western Lane is a coming-of-age story of extraordinary artistic maturity. It is a book of young people muscling themselves through unreconciled grief, and it is a book of simmering intensities, reverberating silences, and exquisite literary timing. This is a book to both share and treasure.
- Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger Stunning . . . Spare, tender, brilliantly achieved . . . It's a novel that unfolds in silences . . . and dares to leave much unsaid.
- Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Where Reasons End This gorgeous tale about a family reeling from loss stands out from the debut crowd... This quiet, elegantly compressed coming-of-age novel . . . operates most powerfully in the gaps outside the plot . . . Few novelists write this simply and richly. With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.
- A D Miller, Booker-shortlisted author of Snowdrops Terrific . . . A symphony of emotion . . . A bold book and a quietly brilliant one
- Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy The beauty of Maroo's novel lies in [its] unfolding, the narrative shaped as much by what is on the page as by what's left unsaid . . . In this graceful novel, the game of squash becomes a way into Gopi's grief and her attempts to process it.
- David Chariandy, author of Brother Melancholy is only one of the moods of this short but brimming book. Squash is also a channel for Gopi's rage; for connections with other players and her longsuffering father; and for a joyous kind of freedom of expression. The novel ends with the tournament, as it must, and Ms. Maroo's writing achieves its most graceful rhythms and prescient insights. You'll want to applaud.
- The Guardian The work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it.
- The Irish Times A profoundly resonant novel . . . This is a debut in which Chetna Maroo gets every choice right, even the riskier ones. It reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills in that sense, and it has the same quality of being so calm, so confident, so close to the profound and yet rooted in real experience. The writing is beautiful and wise.
