Western Lane

(Hardback)

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'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.

Reviews

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
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. Youll want to read it over and over again. -- Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger

Author Bio

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.