Western Lane
A Novel
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Western Lane
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Narrated by:
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Maya Saroya
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Written by:
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Chetna Maroo
About this listen
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.
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
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- rp
- 2024-01-29
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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