Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Another debut that is a revelation is Western Lane (Picador) by Chetna Maroo, the only British writer here (hard not to note that she got her break from magazines in the US and Ireland). Families were clearly a hot topic for this year’s judges, but the simplicity of this book stands apart. It is narrated by 11-year-old Gopi, youngest of three daughters in an Indian family living in south London, whose father schools her in squash at a local leisure centre in the year after their mother’s death. The story evolves as she practises to compete in a tournament: the power of the novel lying in what goes unsaid between Gopi and Pa, between her and an older boy she hits with at the leisure centre, between the sisters, between her and the childless aunt and uncle in Edinburgh where she’s expected to move.

From where I was sitting I could see the gulab jamun Aunt Ranjan had prepared early that same morning. The dark-golden balls of sponge were already soaked in sugar syrup and piled generously in a glass bowl at the end of the counter. Klaces, Caleb (2023-04-26). "Western Lane by Chetna Maroo review – a tender debut". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-09-23. Hardik Pandya’s return to Mumbai Indians explained: Is there a transfer fee involved? How do trades work in IPL? It is no use dwelling on things,” Aunt Ranjan said. She put a hand on Uncle Pavan’s shoulder. “Come, Pavan. Bring two more chairs from the garage so we can all sit together.” Khush is the middle sister of the family, aged 13. She is a thinker and a storyteller of the family, ‘she remembered things we didn’t think of’, said Gopi. Khush is reserved in her grief for her mother, and still speaks to her in Gujarati at nightfall, even after her death.Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements. Oma wanted to say something more to Geeta about the wedding, because she knew there would be no opportunity when she returned home. The house would be filled with aunties and cousins from Delhi and Mombasa and then there would be the wedding itself, and then Geeta would be gone. Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures.

Ravi Mirchandani, Picador’s editor-in-chief, acquired UK and Commonwealth, excluding Canada, at auction from Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. Picador will publish in spring 2023. Mitzi Angel has acquired US rights for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Martha Kanya-Forster of Knopf will publish in Canada.

You can think it out, but in the end you don't know what is going to happen until you go through it."