Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Her literary accomplishments also include being honored with the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a prestigious recognition bestowed by the Paris Review to acknowledge exceptional works of fiction published in the magazine during the preceding year.

Given the familiar storyline presented, The Guardian's Caleb Klaces noted that readers "might expect Western Lane to feel formulaic, but it doesn’t. Gopi cares how her feet fall on the court, the curve of her arm through the air, how close she can keep to the “T”. Pa is outwardly positive, but Gopi reads his “eyes and body”: “He was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him. There was also something about the squash court itself, about the simple white box: it’s such a surreal, unfamiliar place, and in part because of the unfamiliarity it’s a place where time seems suspended and the outside world can be forgotten. She loves listening to the “sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard”, which has an echo “louder than the shot itself”.What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief? As a former national squash champion and an internationally ranked player, I had never considered the power of that echo until I read Maroo’s description. In the unlikely arena of a high-pressure tournament match, she finally discovers a place where “no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think”.

Soon Gopi discovers a talent that draws the attention of Ged, the son of the club’s white manager, who becomes her training partner; and Maqsud, a Pakistani businessman and avid squash player who convinces Pa to enter his daughter into a tournament.And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I don’t know what makes these books endure in my mind, but maybe in part it is the feeling of having genuinely encountered the private world of another person, a sensibility – the narrator’s or the author’s, perhaps both. The narrative of ‘Western Lane’ revolves around the life of an 11-year-old girl named Gopi and her intricate relationships within her family.

Language is hampered by stammers and cultural barricades as well as by things too scary and distressing to sound out. To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”.

All this to say, I’m not sure how best to categorise Western Lane but I’m interested in how readers read it.

They stay up late to watch the same video of the great Pakistani champion Jahangir Khan over and over again.The beauty of Maroo’s novel lies in that unfolding, the narrative shaped as much by what is on the page as by what’s left unsaid. This conveys all the tensions – between care and resentment, responsibility and envy – that play out over the course of the story.