Preview
  • Western Lane

  • By: Chetna Maroo
  • Narrated by: Maya Soroya
  • Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (26 ratings)

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Western Lane

By: Chetna Maroo
Narrated by: Maya Soroya
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Publisher's summary

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 both a valentine and an elegy for innocence—for the closeness of sisterhood, for the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other, for the force of obsession and its consequences.

©2023 Chetna Maroo (P)2023 Dreamscape Media, LLC
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What listeners say about Western Lane

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  • Overall
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Graceful tale of grief

An uplifting tale of a family’s struggle with the unthinkable loss of their mother. Spares no sadness, but hopeful nonetheless.

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    2 out of 5 stars

A Beautiful Gem if a Novel

Without a doubt one of the most beautiful book I have read. The prose vividly brings to life the characters and the emotional forces that they must manage

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  • Overall
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quiet gem

so quiet, deep and true. lovely portrayal of the young girl and her family dealing with the loss of her mother

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Quiet story that is really interesting

I enjoy stories about people dealing with the challenges of everyday life. This isn't just a book about a racket sport. The characters in this novel have tremendous depth. I will be reading it again to spend more time with them.

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2 people found this helpful

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Grief and squash

I loved this book. I chanced upon it from the recently published list of top 100 books in the NYT. It is beautifully written and very nicely narrated. As a lover of the game, there are so many squash references I could relate to. Jahangir Khan, Tahir Zamman, wooden racquets, the T, the tin, etc. All these brought back memories from my childhood in India. This is not a novel with emotional highs and lows. Just a simple story about grief and how it affects a family and how everyone is trying in their own way to cope with it.

Highly recommend.

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Coming of age and grief

Character development focused on the family and the sport of squash. Interesting and lovely. Quick read.

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