Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Plot-wise, too, this Booker Prize-longlisted debut is uncomplicated. A Gujarati immigrant family living in 1980s Britain silently struggles to cope with the death of their Ma, with squash filling those holes. The sport, which takes over the world of Gopi and her emotionally suffocated Pa, provides respite and distraction: each day Gopi practises at Western Lane, a sporting centre outside London, losing herself in her serves and becoming drawn to fellow player, 13-year-old Ged. The narrative alternates between past and present, court and home; while the court provides structure, it’s at home that Gopi, our narrator, observes the crumbling of her family, through subtle details from headaches to whispered conversations. Maroo was born in Kenya and grew up in Britain. Her stories have been published in the Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, the Cincinnati Review and the Bristol and Bridport prize anthologies. In the novel we see the world through the eyes of eleven-year-old Gopi. She and her sisters have recently lost their mother. Their pa is bereft and struggling to parent his daughters. At the same time, the girls’ aunt and uncle watch the family, hoping to help Pa by taking one of the girls to raise as their own. As I was writing, I was feeling my way. I didn’t have a plot or outline for the whole novel, but I had a sense that the story would turn on this one question: would Pa bring himself to let one of his daughters go? All this to say, I’m not sure how best to categorise Western Lane but I’m interested in how readers read it. Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. It feels like the work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it." [5]

Hardik Pandya’s return to Mumbai Indians explained: Is there a transfer fee involved? How do trades work in IPL? Gopi is attuned to subtle details that offer clues to the inner lives of the adults around her: Pa’s failure to fix a radiator, low voices in the garden at night, a spilled glass of chaas. She becomes aware that Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan, who have no children of their own, want her to live with them in Edinburgh. Pa is distracted. Gopi can’t be sure he won’t agree. It was the middle of a heat wave,” he said. He leaned towards Pa. “Do you remember? The night you told Bapuji you were getting married. You were out late and Bapuji insisted we all stay up for you. We had to put boxes of ice in front of the fans and we couldn’t move, it was so hot. When you finally came home, Bapuji told you to come in and asked you in front of everyone what you thought you were doing. You didn’t hesitate. You stood in the doorway and said it as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I am getting married. Like that. It was wonderful. I will never forget the look on Bapuji’s face. You see … I … Charu … she was … she…” youths arrested, car seized: Speeding luxury car rams into two-wheeler in Kolkata, 1 killed, 2 injured Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures.She mentioned that as she delved into these narratives and explored other novels, she encountered the challenge of maintaining a consistent narrative voice. This challenge was particularly pronounced when she had to switch between the perspective of the child and the retrospective narrator. Taking a break and immersing herself in various readings ultimately led to a significant breakthrough. An unforgettable coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel is a moving exploration of the closeness of sisterhood, the immigrant experience, and the collective overcoming of grief. The book culminates in the squash tournament Gopi has been working toward through the novel. Discuss Gopi’s journey as a player. How invested in the sport was she personally, versus how much of it was her father’s drive? A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature.

Geeta was twenty-two, the eldest of the sisters. Ever since she had become engaged to be married she had grown increasingly involved in the details of her siblings’ lives. Our uncle came in then, as if wandering into someone else’s kitchen. Maybe he would have gone right through into his garden but he looked at Mona, then Pa, and stood in the middle of the floor for a few seconds before approaching the table and sitting down between Pa and me. We liked Uncle Pavan. He was Pa’s younger brother and he was big and kind and enjoyed smoking outside and thinking about the past. Their selection was made from 163 books published between October 2022 and September 2023 and submitted by publishers. September 21, 2023 Update Western Lane was announced as one of the six books shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. The winner will be announced on November 26, 2023. Passing through the hallway on their way out, her sisters tipped their heads in the direction of the statue of the goddess Durga. They did it automatically, almost imperceptibly, and with wide, innocent eyes, like spies letting their handler know they had seen him and he should hold his position. Oma did the same, but with less conviction. It was one of many casual gestures of defiance on the part of the sisters. Their parents, aunts, and grandparents had offered unsatisfactory and conflicting answers to the question of why, since they did not believe in gods, their houses were filled with Hindu icons. Oma disliked it when her sisters interrogated their parents and shot glances at one another waiting for the elders to flounder, but she reluctantly played her part in the rituals her sisters established to confound them. She tipped her head to the goddess and moved along. The goddess both frightened and fascinated her, with her eight weaponized arms and peaceful expression.

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Tight, affecting prose . . . The book slowly unearths its protagonist’s inner world as she swings and swats her way through grief . . . Her passion becomes a salve—even as the rest of her world threatens to fragment."

Sarah Bernstein’s ‘Study for Obedience’, ‘If I Survive You’ by Jonathan Escoffery, Paul Harding’s ‘The Other Eden’, Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song’ and Paul Murray’s ‘The Bee Sting’ complete the shortlist of six that will compete for the GBP 50,000 prize to be unveiled on November 26 at an award ceremony in London. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this Booker long-listed short novel, given its focus on squash, which I know nothing about. I can’t say I ever truly understood all that was going on in the games and practices described, but the squash courts of Western Lane and the big tournament in a Perspex box at the end in fact made for atmospheric reading. The story was a sensitively written first-person account in the now adult voice of the protagonist, Gopi, of the year after her mother’s death. Eleven year old Gopi and her two sisters, Khush and Mona, are described by their aunt as “wild,” when she and their uncle seek to take one off their father’s hands, to be raised as their own. Instead, the girls’ father, Pa, throws himself into coaching the three girls to play squash, saying, “I want you to become interested in something you can do your whole life.” It is Gopi who takes most strongly to the sport, and soon she is practising with a young white boy at the club, while Pa smokes and talks with the boy’s mother. But grief continues to gnaw at the family, affecting each of them differently. The Bee Sting by Ireland’s Murray is a tragicomedy about an Irish family in crisis and the longest novel on the list. The judging panel, chaired by the Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, said Murray’s fourth novel was “funny, sad and truthful” and that the characters, with “myriad flaws and problems”, are “unforgettable”. There is nothing hurried about squash. Watch Jahangir Khan between shots and it is as if he’s doing nothing. Maroo achieves something of this almost stillness, rhythmic quality and precision in her prose. Western Lane has a dreamy intensity . . . Gopi is steadily finding out what she can make of her feelings, of her life, of the people she meets and the heights she might aspire to."

Then, due to the fact the protagonist/narrator is an eleven-year-old Anglo-Indian girl, the prose is purposefully flat and unadorned. It reads just slightly more elevated than an elementary school reader - more reportage than anything. So I found much of the story plodding, due to the mundane style. Others have praised the view it gave into Indian family dynamics, but I have read such a plethora of Southeast Asian literature that it didn't seem necessarily novel or fresh to me. Much later, Khush would s

Klaces, Caleb (2023-04-26). "Western Lane by Chetna Maroo review – a tender debut". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-09-23. Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is about a young woman who travels to an unspecified remote northern country to be housekeeper for her brother. Judges thought the book was a “stirring meditation on survival and a pointed critique of the demonisation of the outsider”. Squash champions Jahangir Khan of Pakistan and Ross Norman of New Zealand in a picture dated 9 July 2004. (HT Photo) Kenya-born Maroo's novel, set within the context of the British Gujarati milieu, has been praised by the Booker judges for its use of the sport of squash as a metaphor for complex human emotions. Maroo’s tale traverses the complexities of one family with an understated beauty, simultaneously graceful and teeming with fierceness, much like Gopi on the court. It is a powerful coming-of-age story, a tale of growing up as much as a tale of grief.”So all in all, this quiet, shortish text offers many good ideas and is an interesting investigation into the nature of grief, but it is oh-so-slow and the set-up is very transparent and thus not particularly elegant, and sometimes even formulaic. I'm afraid this story is overall a little forgettable, but I feel like Maroo is very talented and could soon come up with a banger - this ain't it though, and the judges didn't do her any favors by nominating her now.