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Product Info
Publisher: Picador
Author: Chetna Maroo
ISBN: 9781250321930
Year: 2023
Format: Paperback
Fiction, Coming of Age
Western Lane
by
Chetna Maroo
Western Lane by
Chetna Maroo
Reviews
"Profoundly resonant . . . A remarkable book in how it deals with that time, drifting forwards, backwards, sometimes superimposing different moments upon each other. To that end, it also contains some of the best sports writing I've read since Eimear Ryan's Holding Her Breath . . . In the act of making books, writers make choices on every line, with every word. This is a debut in which Chetna Maroo gets every choice right"
Irish Times
Summary
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 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.
