Western Lane

Shortlisted For The Booker Prize

De: Chetna Maroo

Narrado por: Maya Saroya

'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, author of Normal People

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the William Hill Award
A BBC Arts & The Reading Agency's Big Sporting Read selection
Selected by Dua Lipa as one of Service95's 'Books of the Year'

A deeply moving novel about grief, sisterhood and a teenage girl's struggle to transcend herself.

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 unforgettable coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane is an exploration of the closeness of sisterhood, the immigrant experience, and the collective overcoming of grief.

A 'Book of the Year' in The Economist, The Independent, The Week, The New York Times and The Guardian

'With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.' – The Times

'Stunning . . . Spare, tender, brilliantly achieved' – The Guardian

Reseñas de la Crítica

&#39;<i>Western </i><i>Lane</i> is a <b>beautiful and evocative</b> novel about grief, about growing up, about losing and winning. <b>The people and places in this book will stay with me for a long time</b>.&#39; (Sally Rooney)

A slim, subtle debut novel of grief and growing up that <b>conjures a powerful panoply of emotions</b>

<b>Stunning . . . </b>Spare, tender, <b>brilliantly achieved</b> . . . A novel that unfolds in silences . . . and dares to leave much unsaid.

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&hellip; 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.

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

<b>Terrific </b>. . . <b>A symphony of emotion</b> . . . A bold book and a quietly<b> brilliant </b>one

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

Melancholy is only one of the moods of this short but brimming book. Squash is also a channel for Gopi&rsquo;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&rsquo;s writing achieves its most <b>graceful rhythms and prescient insights. You&rsquo;ll want to applaud.</b>

A vivid depiction of grief, love and sisterhood

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&rsquo;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, <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!&#39; (Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Where Reasons End)