Western Lane

By: Chetna Maroo

Narrated by: Maya Soroya

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.

©2023 Chetna Maroo (P)2023 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Graceful tale of grief

An uplifting tale of a family’s struggle with the unthinkable loss of their mother. Spares no sadness, but hopeful nonetheless.

A Beautiful Gem if a Novel

Without a doubt one of the most beautiful book I have read. The prose vividly brings to life the characters and the emotional forces that they must manage

quiet gem

so quiet, deep and true. lovely portrayal of the young girl and her family dealing with the loss of her mother

Grief and squash

I loved this book. I chanced upon it from the recently published list of top 100 books in the NYT. It is beautifully written and very nicely narrated. As a lover of the game, there are so many squash references I could relate to. Jahangir Khan, Tahir Zamman, wooden racquets, the T, the tin, etc. All these brought back memories from my childhood in India. This is not a novel with emotional highs and lows. Just a simple story about grief and how it affects a family and how everyone is trying in their own way to cope with it.

Highly recommend.

Coming of age and grief

Character development focused on the family and the sport of squash. Interesting and lovely. Quick read.

Quiet story that is really interesting

I enjoy stories about people dealing with the challenges of everyday life. This isn't just a book about a racket sport. The characters in this novel have tremendous depth. I will be reading it again to spend more time with them.