Western Lane

Critics Review

• ‘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

• A slim, subtle debut novel of grief and growing up that conjures a powerful panoply of emotions

  The Economist, 'The Best Books of 2023'

• Stunning . . . Spare, tender, brilliantly achieved . . . A novel that unfolds in silences . . . and dares to leave much unsaid.

  The Guardian

• A deeply evocative debut about a family grappling with grief, conveyed through crystalline language

  The Judges of the Booker Prize

• This gorgeous tale about a family reeling from loss stands out from the debut crowd… This quiet, elegantly compressed coming-of-age novel . . . operates most powerfully in the gaps outside the plot . . . Few novelists write this simply and richly. With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.

  The Times

• Maroo’s quiet sentences contain multitudes on cultural tensions and grief, on the wordless love between a father and a daughter.

  The Telegraph

• Terrific . . . A symphony of emotion . . . A bold book and a quietly brilliant one

  The Economist

• The beauty of Maroo’s novel lies in [its] unfolding, the narrative shaped as much by what is on the page as by what’s left unsaid . . . In this graceful novel, the game of squash becomes a way into Gopi’s grief and her attempts to process it.

  The New York Times

• Melancholy is only one of the moods of this short but brimming book. Squash is also a channel for Gopi’s rage; for connections with other players and her longsuffering father; and for a joyous kind of freedom of expression. The novel ends with the tournament, as it must, and Ms. Maroo’s writing achieves its most graceful rhythms and prescient insights. You’ll want to applaud.

  The Wall Street Journal

• A vivid depiction of grief, love and sisterhood

  Independent

• Starting off as an intimate tone poem, this story of a squash-obsessed teenager expands into something with the amplitude, depth, and ringing power of a great symphony. In other words–WOW. Western Lane is glorious. You’ll want to read it over and over again.

  Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger

• Combining the precision and the efficiency of an athlete with the mysteries of childhood loss and memory, Western Lane is a novel in which we linger on every breathing line and relish every close observation. What an exceptionally talented writer Chetna Maroo is!’

  Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Where Reasons End

• [A] slim, subtle, moving story . . . about grief and growing up in a Gujarati family in Britain . . . A bold book [and] a quietly brilliant one.

  A D Miller, Booker-shortlisted author of Snowdrops

• Chetna Maroo captures with great poignancy and accuracy the bewilderment and groping for meaning that loss brings—but also how small acts of kindness ultimately redeem us from this loss. Truly a gem of a novel, this deceptively simple story told in a sparse, elegant style kept revealing its depths long after I had closed its pages.

  Shyam Selvadurai, author of Funny Boy

• Lean, agile, and quietly deadly, Western Lane is a coming-of-age story of extraordinary artistic maturity. It is a book of young people muscling themselves through unreconciled grief, and it is a book of simmering intensities, reverberating silences, and exquisite literary timing. This is a book to both share and treasure.

  David Chariandy, author of Brother

• Western Lane has a dreamy intensity . . . Exquisite

  TLS

• A profoundly resonant novel . . . This is a debut in which Chetna Maroo gets every choice right, even the riskier ones. It reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills in that sense, and it has the same quality of being so calm, so confident, so close to the profound and yet rooted in real experience. The writing is beautiful and wise.

  The Irish Times

• Listeners will connect with this story of loss, cultural struggle, and the many stages of grief. Soroya pulls us closer to Gopi’s truncated world as playing squash comes to replace the gaping losses in her life.

  AudioFile