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 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe. 

I really enjoyed Western Lane, shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. A beautiful, graceful book, short but unhurried, its a compelling tale of grief and compassion, family and competition.

https://quizlit.org/book-of-the-month-december-2023 ( )

I think this is a lovely story. ( )

Thin and laboured. Struggling to see the beauty of the prose. ( )

I can honestly say, this is the first family drama I have ever thoroughly enjoyed, one in which I truly liked ever character. I initially thought, the first family drama without an antagonist, but wait, there is one, Grief.
The story is told by 11 year old, Gopi, the youngest of three sisters. They and their Pa are struggling with the recent loss of mother and wife. Grief weighs heavily on them all and each has their own way of trying to reconcile with this loss.
For Gopi it is playing squash at Western Lane, a sports facility in England. Once a passion of her fathers, it is now Gobi's. Not only to please her father or to practice with 13 year old local boy, Ged, but as a sort of release.
Tensions run deep as they struggle but there is no denying it circles around the love each member has for each other.
Beautifully written and with so much feel it is hard to believe one can get so attached in a slim novel of only 150 pages. That's solid writing, in my opinion. ( )

Seems all my Goodreads pals are rather underwhelmed with this one and I’m out on a limb by my lonesome here! No problem with that though.

Sometimes we need something to save us, and finding it, or something that will serve for it at any rate, we grasp hold tightly. This short novel explores that dynamic with great empathy, building care for characters who are completely unfamiliar to me in one sense (British-Indian Jains) though my fellow humans in the deeper more important sense, and through an activity in the sport of squash that was only slightly more recognizable to me than the mostly incomprehensible sport of cricket. This learning opportunity added additional interest in my case (I’ve read novels that describe cricket of course; nothing doing).

With connections to Claire Keegan and Yiyun Li one could expect Maroo to produce a certain sort of quiet detailed prose and this she mostly has done in this her debut. The father’s emotionally bottled up distance was painfully evoked in brief passages of text throughout, most notably. An emphasis on sound was another thing I noticed. Here in the very opening page sound, and its lack, are used to suggest the father’s distance, and that which saves.

My father was standing far back, waiting. I knew from his silence that he wasn’t going to move first, and all I could do was serve and volley or disappoint him. The smudges on the wall blurred one into the other and I thought that surely I would fall. That was when it started up. A steady, melancholy rhythm from the other court, the shot and its echo, over and over again, like some sort of deliverance. I could tell it was one person conducting a drill. And I knew who it was. I stood there, listening, and the sound poured into me, into my nerves and bones, and it was with a feeling of having been rescued that I raised my racket and served.

I enjoyed this more than the elaborately decorative prose of Harding, for sure, but we’ll see what else the Booker longlist has to offer! ( )