Western Lane

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023.

A beautiful and moving novel about grief, sisterhood and a teenage girl s struggle to transcend herself.

WOW. Western Lane is glorious. You’ll want to read it over and over again. - Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger

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.

Few novelists write this simply and richly. With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.’ - The Times

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