Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (HC)

A beautiful and moving first 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 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.

REVIEWS

“Audacious in its quietness . . . Tune into its wavelength, though, and you hear a symphony of emotion. Through the half-understood exchanges and scenes her narrator recounts, Ms Maroo beautifully conveys the eddies of guilt and recrimination in a bereaved home, and the way feelings can be experienced as physical sensations.”―The Economist

“This excellent debut lives in the small moments . . . Maroo’s calm, steady prose is so attuned to its subject matter it barely needs lyrical adornment . . . Few novelists write this simply and richly. With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.”―The Times (UK)

"[Western Lane] feels like the work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it . . . Maroo has a talent for making the space she needs for emotional complexity by way of physical description."―The Guardian (UK)

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 978-1529094626
Pages: 176