Western Lane Synopsis
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, NPR, and Kirkus
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.
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Chetna Maroo Press Reviews
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. - The Times
Terrific . . . A symphony of emotion . . . A bold book and a quietly brilliant one - The Economist
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. - The New York Times
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. - Wall Street Journal
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. -- Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger Combining the precision and the efficiency of an athlete with the mysteries of childhood loss and memory, Western Lane is a novel in which we linger on every breathing line and relish every close observation. What an exceptionally talented writer Chetna Maroo is!' -- Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Where Reasons End [A] slim, subtle, moving story . . . about grief and growing up in a Gujarati family in Britain . . . A bold book [and] a quietly brilliant one. -- A D Miller, Booker-shortlisted author of Snowdrops 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. -- Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy 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. -- David Chariandy, author of Brother The work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it. - The Guardian
There are no villains in this exquisite novel (unless you include Death); everybody wants what is best and behaves with kindness. It could be syrupy-sweet, like Aunt Ranjan's gulab jamun, but it isn't. - TLS
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. - The Irish Times
