A <b>deeply evocative</b> 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 . . . <b>Few novelists write this simply and richly.</b> With this <b>gorgeous debut</b>, 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

Western Lane has a dreamy intensity . . . Exquisite

TLS

<b>Terrific </b>. . . <b>A symphony of emotion</b> . . . A bold book and a quietly<b> brilliant </b>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 . . . <b>In this graceful novel, the game of squash becomes a way into Gopi’s grief and her attempts to process it.</b>

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 <b>graceful rhythms and prescient insights. You’ll want to applaud.</b>

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--<b>WOW. <i>Western Lane</i> is glorious. </b>You’ll want to read it over and over again.

- Aravind Adiga, author of <i>The White Tiger</i>,

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

- Yiyun Li, author of <i>A Thousand Years of Good Prayers</i> and<i> Where Reasons End</i>,

[A] <b>slim, subtle, moving story</b> . . . 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<i> Snowdrops</i>,

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 <b>a gem of a novel</b>, 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 <i>Funny Boy</i>,

Lean, agile, and quietly deadly, <i>Western Lane</i> 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 <b>a book to both share and treasure.</b>

- David Chariandy, author of <i>Brother</i>,

<b>A profoundly resonant novel </b>. . . This is a debut in which Chetna Maroo gets every choice right, even the riskier ones. It reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>A Pale View of Hills</i> 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. <b>The writing is beautiful and wise.</b>

The Irish Times