Author(s): Chetna Maroo

Novel | 2023 Booker short list

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. 

Skilfully deploying the sport of squash as both context and metaphor, Western Lane is a deeply evocative debut about a family grappling with grief, conveyed through crystalline language which reverberates like the sound “of a ball hit clean and hard…with a close echo” — The Booker Prize 2023 judges

'Few novelists write this simply and richly. With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.' - The Times
'Terrific . . . Slim, subtle, moving . . . a bold book and a quietly brilliant one' - The Economist
 '[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.' - The Guardian

Author Biography: Chetna Maroo lives in London, UK. 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.