Western Lane

November 28, 2022
In Maroo’s compact and powerful debut, the members of a grieving Jain family dedicate their lives to squash in late-1980s England. After Gopi, Khush, and Mona’s mother dies, their father decides to transform the family’s casual weekly games into an intense training program. Gopi, the youngest at 11, quickly becomes the best competitor of the trio, and when not at school or Gujarati class, she studies videos of matches and hones her game in the courts at an athletic center called Western Lane, eventually practicing against Ged, the white 13-year-old son of an employee there. The pair catch the eye of Maqsud, a Pakistani man who urges them to register for an upcoming tournament. Gopi steps up her training, falling for Ged in the process. Meanwhile, Mona, 15, takes on household duties, and the grieving Khush, 13, prefers to speak in their mother’s favored Gujarati. With Gopi’s fluid narration, Maroo skillfully balances the drama of Gopi’s upcoming squash tournament with the nuances of family drama, describing, for instance, how their father’s encounters with Ged’s mother differ from his “way with Ma or our aunties or any of the women we knew.” This will invigorate readers. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency.

December 1, 2022
In Maroo's first novel,11-year-old Gopi and her two sisters must cope with the recent loss of their mother. Their father is a withdrawn man mourning in his own quiet way. He starts the girls on a strict regimen. They will play squash every day, before and after school, at a gym called Western Lane. Three parallel forces gain momentum--Gopi's talent and passion for the sport, a budding romance with Ged, an older boy who practices at Western Lane, and rising tension among the three sisters as each member of the family becomes private and distant in grief. The conflict reaches its peak as Gopi competes as the underdog in a long-awaited squash tournament. Maroo's tale traverses the complexities of one family with an understated beauty, simultaneously graceful and teeming with fierceness, much like Gopi on the court. It is a powerful coming-of-age story, a tale of growing up as much as a tale of grief.

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Starred review from December 1, 2022
A grieving family's life is altered when they become obsessed with the game of squash. Gopi is the youngest in a family of three daughters. Her sisters, Mona and Khush, are 15 and 13, respectively, and Gopi is just 11 when the novel opens. The girls' mother has just died. When a relative tells Gopi's father that he must find something for his daughters to do to keep them from running wild, Pa decides they should take up squash at Western Lane, the sports center near their home in England. All the girls train diligently, but only Gopi shows true talent. Pa begins to train her harder, finding her an opponent in 13-year-old Ged, the son of a Western Lane employee, and finding himself a friend in Ged's mother. Gopi pushes herself harder and harder on the squash court, finding release in the repetition of drills and volleys. ("It was with a feeling of having been rescued that I raised my racket and served," she remembers.) As Gopi disappears into her new identity as an athlete, the rest of her family members are struggling under the weight of their bereavement and the pressure to move forward with their lives under the watchful eyes of their relatives and their community. It is this pressure that threatens to crack the family apart forever. Maroo's subtle and elegant writing at first seems surprisingly restrained for a novel about a subject as high-spirited and energetic as squash and from a narrator as generally high-spirited and energetic as an 11-year-old girl. But Gopi's retrospective narration accumulates slow layers of heartbreak as the story proceeds, patiently building up an entire landscape of emotion through gestures, silences, and overheard murmurings in the dark. A debut novel of immense poise and promise.

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