Eleven-year-old Gopi has played squash for as long as she can remember. After her mother dies, her father begins training her with an intensity that turns the court into both refuge and discipline. 

As Gopi’s game sharpens, the rest of her life narrows. Her sisters begin to seem further away; her father’s care becomes difficult to separate from demand; the rhythms of squash start to organise everything. A very softly-spoken, beautiful novel, about grief, family and the forms love takes when nobody is especially good at speaking about loss. Much of what matters sits just outside the sentence, in withheld feeling, gesture and routine. Squash gives the novel its structure and its language — impact, echo, anticipation, return — while Gopi’s growing skill becomes inseparable from questions of intimacy, identity and what a child can absorb without quite understanding it.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, Western Lane is slight in size but extremely controlled.

Edition/Condition: Picador / Pan Macmillan, 2023. Paperback. Booker Prize 2023 shortlist edition. Light shelf wear to covers and edges; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.