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 indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo's first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.
1990 in London and Carmel’s daughter is suspected of murdering another child. Carmel is beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and was once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there’s nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape.
Reporter Tom Hargreaves, with a fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the ‘peasants’ stumbles across this scoop, a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and ‘bad apples’, he persuades his paper to put them up in a hotel with all bar expenses paid. In the conversations that follow, the family are forced to confront the secrets, prejudices and silences that have trapped them for generations.
This beautiful, heart-wrenching novel confronts head-on the tension between privacy, suffering and the search for truth.