Squash, grief and growing up are the themes of a new novel by debutante Chetna Maroo which is receiving critical acclaim.
Western Lane is set in Luton in the late 1980s and narrated by 11-year-old Gopi, a promising squash player whose mother has recently died and is thereafter raised by her father and the rest of her emotionally tight-lipped family.
Burying his grief, Gopi’s father (who she calls ‘Pa’) channels his emotion and energy into his daughter’s burgeoning squash career. Together, they obsessively watch videos of Jahangir Khan and Gopi finds ‘peace’ in long early-morning practice sessions at the eponymous Western Lane squash club.
On the horizon throughout the book is the Durham and Cleveland tournament which she is utterly determined to win. A love interest who she meets at the squash club, Ged, somewhat complicates her ambition.
Gopi longs for a Dunlop racket which her eldest sister Mona buys for her with her own money, defying their father’s preference for wooden rackets, as used by his hero Khan.
The book is full of suppressed emotion and tension as well as metaphor and imagery, particularly when describing Gopi’s experience of playing squash. Gopi and Pa spend hours ghosting – playing the game with something significant missing (echoing their strained domestic lives).
On the squash court, Gopi finds relief from all the agonies going on in her life outside it. Focusing on her footwork, the curve of her arm through a shot, her proximity to the T, even the “sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard” provide welcome distractions.
It is evocative in many ways for any squash player, especially those who remember the sport’s popularity of that era.
The Sunday Times review, by Claire Allfree, said: “With this gorgeous debut, Maroo blows most of the competition off the court.”
In The Guardian, Caleb Klaces wrote: “It feels like the work of a writer who knows what they want to do, and who has the rare ability to do it.”
Western Lane is published by Picador (£14.99).