Available Formats
Hardback
Published: 16th February 2023
Hardback
Published: 26th September 2023
Paperback
Published: 12th September 2023
Paperback
Published: 27th August 2024
Western Lane
By (Author) Chetna Maroo
Pan Macmillan
Picador
12th September 2023
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary
Family life fiction
Narrative theme: Coming of age
Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss
Narrative theme: Identity / belonging
Squash and rackets (racquets)
Paperback
176
Width 135mm, Height 216mm
300g
'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.