Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

For fans of David Chariandy’s Brother, this gem-like novel announces a startling literary talent and packs an emotional punch through controlled prose and narrative precision.

Western Lane is the story of Gopi, the youngest of three sisters who live with their father on the outskirts of London. Their mother has died; their father’s grief is palpable but unarticulated.

Far away in Edinburgh their uncle and aunt worry and wait: unable to have children, the couple’s wish to take a niece into their home and raise her as their own hangs over the girls like a curse in a fairy tale.

In the meantime, the girls’ father becomes obsessed with teaching his daughters to play squash at the local leisure centre. Gopi is good, an intense and strategic student of the game, and soon her world starts to shrink down to the small square space of the court.