Western Lane: Shortlisted For The Booker Prize 2023

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What drove you to invest so much editorial energy in this unspoken communication between characters? How does it feel to be nominated for the Booker Prize 2023, and what would winning the prize mean to you - especially as one of several debut novelists on the longlist? As I began writing, it made sense to me – the way attention is focused outwards in the game, the concentration, the movement of bodies in sync with one another.

It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot. They struggle to manage their grief under the suspicious gaze of their close-knit Gujarati community, with no help from their distant and distracted father. Though I played squash for many years and the game is still vivid in my imagination I don’t know where the connection with this grieving family came from, but I trusted it. 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.She mentioned that as she delved into these narratives and explored other novels, she encountered the challenge of maintaining a consistent narrative voice.

Taking a break and immersing herself in various readings ultimately led to a significant breakthrough. She loves listening to the “sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard”, which has an echo “louder than the shot itself”. 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.This was just the rhythm of life as she experienced it as a child, inside this family dealing with loss. Booklist also reviewed the novel, [9] as well the audiobook, noting that "London actor [Maya] Saroya is a gentle, measured cipher, moving seamlessly between the crisper British English of the sisters and their contemporaries and the more lyrical South Asian accents of the older generation.

In a reflective moment about her creative process, Chetna Maroo shared insights during an interview, where she explained that the book had been essentially crafted as a compilation of dense short stories, mostly in the first person. The sisters have always spoken Gujarati, their mother tongue, but not well enough to converse easily with their own mother, and so when she was alive the girls had learned to read her body and to communicate by being physical in her presence. She becomes aware that Aunt Ranjan and Uncle Pavan, who have no children of their own, want her to live with them in Edinburgh. He said this, but with his eyes and his body – his shoulders, his throat, the white bones visible under his skin – 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.

Language is hampered by stammers and cultural barricades as well as by things too scary and distressing to sound out.

This conveys all the tensions – between care and resentment, responsibility and envy – that play out over the course of the story. They stay up late to watch the same video of the great Pakistani champion Jahangir Khan over and over again. Interestingly, before embarking on her writing career, Chetna Maroo had worked as an accountant, a lesser-known facet of her professional journey.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. 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’. When she's on the court, she feels more connected to her father and connects with Ged, who also excels playing squash. I have to trust that the work will benefit in the end from the rhythm and slow quality of this attention.