Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

Product Information

As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another. Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. I have to trust that the work will benefit in the end from the rhythm and slow quality of this attention. Interestingly, before embarking on her writing career, Chetna Maroo had worked as an accountant, a lesser-known facet of her professional journey.

The language barrier meant they “pulled at her, pushed into her, made ourselves physical in her presence”. Hers is an unhurried performance, as if leaving open breathing room for the unspeakable, the absent, and perhaps even a little space for hopeful potential.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. Gopi is attracted to Ged’s stammer because “it seemed like you were drifting close to him in the silence”. Though I played squash for many years and the game is still vivid in my imagination I don’t know where the connection with this grieving family came from, but I trusted it. It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot. Soon Gopi discovers a talent that draws the attention of Ged, the son of the club’s white manager, who becomes her training partner; and Maqsud, a Pakistani businessman and avid squash player who convinces Pa to enter his daughter into a tournament.

And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. Instead, she’s listening to the sound of the ball hitting the wall on the adjacent court, “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo. What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters?Cautioned by a concerned relative to find a healthy outlet for his daughters, Pa turns the family’s casual weekly squash game at a local sports center into daily, determined training sessions.

The novel follows Gopi, an 11-year-old girl who has been playing squash since she could first grasp a racket. What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief? At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. The narrative of ‘Western Lane’ revolves around the life of an 11-year-old girl named Gopi and her intricate relationships within her family. I usually try to get each sentence and paragraph sounding right before I go on, reading and editing from the beginning of the story.

Chetna Maroo’s debut novel begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi and her two older sisters in the care of their father. In the unlikely arena of a high-pressure tournament match, she finally discovers a place where “no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think”.

When Gopi occasionally remembers something about her mother, it is visceral – watching Wimbledon while eating strawberries with sugar. Chetna Maroo resides in London and has contributed her stories to esteemed publications such as the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review. With Pa, she spends hours “ghosting”, which means playing with something crucial missing – the ball – in a practice that seems more significant “than a rehearsal or drill”. All this to say, I’m not sure how best to categorise Western Lane but I’m interested in how readers read it. My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way.

I had never considered how much of the game unfolds in that hollow pop, or how much of my profession depended on that lonely sound.