Chetna Maroo with Yiyun Li: Western Lane

Chetna Maroo with Yiyun Li: Western Lane

Tuesday, February 07, 2023 - 5:00PM ET
Event Location: 
Virtual

This virtual event is in partnership with Book Passage and Literati Bookstore, taking place on Book Passage's YouTube channel.

Join us to celebrate the release of Western Lane with author Chetna Maroo, in conversation with Yiyun Li.

No registration is required for this event - just head to Book Passage's YouTube channel at the time of the event to view the livestream.

 

Western Lane

“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.” —Abeje Schnake, Booklist

“Compact and powerful . . . This will invigorate readers.” —Publisher’s Weekly

A taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete's struggle to transcend herself.

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.

But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.

An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.

Chetna Maroo lives in London. 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.

Moderator Yiyun Li is the author of ten books, including The Book of Goose, Where Reasons End, and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, and Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li. Li’s many honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, and the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the director of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing.