Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Drawing on the true story of the forced eviction of a mixed-race island community in New England before the first world war, it may have Edugyan’s vote but I think it’s a novel that’s hard to love. We follow various descendants of a freed slave as a well-meaning missionary, privately racist, attempts to spare one of them – a gifted young painter who happens to pass as white – by having him moved to a friend’s estate on shore. Publishers Weekly called Western Lane "compact and powerful," highlighting how "Maroo skillfully balances" the novel's varied dramas. [8] To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”. There is a parallel with the tight enclosure of the short novel. Maroo has a talent for making the space she needs for emotional complexity by way of physical description. “There was a sullenness about her,” she writes of eldest sister Mona, “a tightness in her muscles, and a refusal of ease or rhythm in her movement.” This conveys all the tensions – between care and resentment, responsibility and envy – that play out over the course of the story. Reviewer Ivy Pochoda ( The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street, These Women a.o.) was a professional squash player prior to becoming an author.

Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . .

The family in this novel gets over the grief of losing the mother by playing Squash. Lots of it. The youngest girl, Gopi, shows the most talent and then her father subjects her to an intense training regime. Sport is a way for the two to connect but it also becomes life consuming. Commenting on the fact that more men appear on the list than in recent years, Edugyan said that “it’s the strength and the quality of the work that landed these writers” on the shortlist. Her fellow judge, the actor Robert Webb, joked that “it was very much the work that we were concentrating on rather than whether or not they were called Paul”. Geeta was twenty-two, the eldest of the sisters. Ever since she had become engaged to be married she had grown increasingly involved in the details of her siblings’ lives. Try and talk to the other girls,” Mia said softly at her side, “but if someone is very nice to you, you don’t have to tell them all your thoughts.” I told Charu,’ she said. ‘I am not blaming her, brother, but I am telling you it is not too late for your girls.’

Maroo, a British Indian writer born in Kenya, lives in London and worked until recently as an accountant. Her stories have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including the Stinging Fly and the Cincinnati Review , and h er first novel, Western Lane , will be published in 2023 by Picador (UK), Farrar, Straus and Giroux (U.S.), and Knopf (Canada).

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Gopi is attuned to subtle details that offer clues to the inner lives of the adults around her: Pa’s failure to fix a radiator, low voices in the garden at night, a spilled glass of chaas. She becomes aware that Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan, who have no children of their own, want her to live with them in Edinburgh. Pa is distracted. Gopi can’t be sure he won’t agree. youths arrested, car seized: Speeding luxury car rams into two-wheeler in Kolkata, 1 killed, 2 injured A rich correspondence between the rituals of grief and competition . . . Melancholy is only one of the moods of this short but brimming book. Squash is also a channel for Gopi’s rage; for connections with other players and her longsuffering father; and for a joyous kind of freedom of expression . . . Maroo’s writing achieves its most graceful rhythms and prescient insights. You’ll want to applaud.”