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  • Western Lane

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Chetna Maroo
  • Narrated by: Maya Saroya
  • Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
  • 1.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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Western Lane

Written by: Chetna Maroo
Narrated by: Maya Saroya
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Publisher's Summary

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself.

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

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.

©2023 Chetna Maroo (P)2023 Knopf Canada
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What the critics say

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE

One of The New York Times Notable Books of 2023

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

WINNER OF THE PARIS REVIEW’S PLIMPTON PRIZE FOR FICTION

“Skillfully 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.’”—2023 Booker Prize judges

Western Lane is a beautiful and evocative novel about grief, about growing up, about losing and winning. The people and places in this book will stay with me for a long time.”—Sally Rooney

“Elegant in economy, original in voice, graceful in craft, Western Lane transforms a coming-of-age story from the merely compelling into an unflinchingly honest and all-too-human portrait of a passage we all endure, no matter our circumstance, our family history, or our ability to hit a squash ball. Chetna Maroo is an artist of rare gifts, and Western Lane is a masterpiece.”—CS Richardson, author of All the Colour in the World

What listeners say about Western Lane

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No story

The book goes on and on about random ramblings without any anchoring/timeline details. Every sentence is written as if it’s important until it ends and you realize it’s just a random statement.

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