Western Lane

"Shortlist"

"The book that jumped out at me, personally, from the shortlist this year was Chetna Maroo’s strange, sparse little novel about a Jain family living in Luton, England. In the aftermath of their mother’s death, the youngest of three daughters become fixated on the sport squash, spending hours training at a local sports centre with her father every day. Together they drive troubling thoughts of death from their minds with a regimen of drills, ‘ghosting’, sprints, and increasingly desperate matches. Although I’m not particularly athletic, I do have a soft spot for sporting novels —which tend to feature singular characters with obsessive mindsets and near-mystical descriptions of physical exertion. Though very different in terms of content, in style it reminded me of Sally Rooney thanks to its restrained evocation of complex emotions and fraught interactions. In Western Lane , Maroo’s debut, we see squash as an act of sublimation. “In many ways, this intimate sport is loneliness itself,” noted Ivy Pochoda, former US squash champion and New York Times reviewer: “The game of squash becomes a way into Gopi’s grief and her attempts to process it. Only on the court does she have space to grieve alone, independent of her sisters, to submit to the void and find her footing within it.”"

"What is it like to be a child sports prodigy? We’re captivated by the real-life stories of Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters. Now, in her taut, spare debut novel, Chetna Maroo introduces us to Gopi, a fictional 11-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants living in a London suburb. Her extraordinary talents in the game of squash are revealed in the wake of a devastating tragedy that leaves Gopi, her sisters and her father emotionally frozen and fragile. In selecting this novel as a finalist for the Booker Prize, the judges especially singled out Western Lane for its language, praising its “crystalline prose that also feels warm and tender, which can be a difficult balance to strike.”"