Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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Price: £7.495
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Her stories have been published in the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly and the Dublin Review and she was the recipient of the 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction. To navigate the sport’s punishing constraints, Gopi learns, you “have to find the shots and make the space you need”. What made you choose sport - and squash in particular - as a way for the family to deal with their grief?

In the unlikely arena of a high-pressure tournament match, she finally discovers a place where “no one was rushing me, and if I wanted to, I could think”.I had the feeling that spoken language had become a wall for the girls, an obstacle to knowing and being known. Gopi is attracted to Ged’s stammer because “it seemed like you were drifting close to him in the silence”. Taking a break and immersing herself in various readings ultimately led to a significant breakthrough. Chetna Maroo’s debut novel begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi and her two older sisters in the care of their father. My own process seems unwise to me because I know I’ll eventually cut sections that I’ve spent weeks or months going over, but I have no other way.

And if you’d let me have a Booker-longlisted novel, I’d add My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout.I had never considered how much of the game unfolds in that hollow pop, or how much of my profession depended on that lonely sound. Recently a friend asked me if the book has something of the detective story about it, with Gopi trying to find her way, piecing together the clues of small gestures, actions and fragments of overheard conversations; she has little to go on and since she’s dealing with the mysteries of loss, there are no answers for her. There was also something about the squash court itself, about the simple white box: it’s such a surreal, unfamiliar place, and in part because of the unfamiliarity it’s a place where time seems suspended and the outside world can be forgotten.

I have to trust that the work will benefit in the end from the rhythm and slow quality of this attention.Chetna Maroo resides in London and has contributed her stories to esteemed publications such as the Paris Review, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review. Pa is outwardly positive, but Gopi reads his “eyes and body”: “He was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him. I don’t know what makes these books endure in my mind, but maybe in part it is the feeling of having genuinely encountered the private world of another person, a sensibility – the narrator’s or the author’s, perhaps both. It seemed such an off-the-wall idea but it brought to my mind something Lorrie Moore suggested in her introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories About Childhood: that the acquisition of knowing and the subject of knowing or not knowing are ‘the unshakeable centre of any childhood story’.

Gopi cares how her feet fall on the court, the curve of her arm through the air, how close she can keep to the “T”.Interestingly, before embarking on her writing career, Chetna Maroo had worked as an accountant, a lesser-known facet of her professional journey.



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