Western Lane

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 both a valentine and an elegy for innocence—for the closeness of sisterhood for the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other for the force of obsession and its consequences.