Western Lane

Name: Western Lane
Author: Chetna Maroo
ISBN: 9781039004054

Chetna Maroo

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Western Lane

Chetna Maroo

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Western Lane was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, named a Notable Book by The New York Times, and named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, NPR, and Kirkus. 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.

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