Western Lane | 誠品線上

Western Lane

內容簡介

內容簡介 2024布克獎入圍名單11歲的歌琵，在她小時候能拿起球拍時，就開始打壁球了。當母親去世的時候，全家陷入巨大的傷痛，父親為了讓孩子度過這段期間，帶她們到Western Lane一間運動中心打壁球紓解壓力，其他的女孩表現得中規中矩，只有歌琵展現出驚人的天份。父親發現歌琵的能力，決定全力栽培她，甚至讓運動中心老闆13歲的兒子傑德和她一起練習。歌琵一路苦練，發球、凌空抽擊、截擊球、直擊球…和壁球場無盡的回音，她將失去母親的痛苦隱藏於心中，將疑惑、懵懂與未知的憂傷一擊又一擊揮打出去。她年紀輕輕就成為職業選手，卻發現自己和其他姊妹已漸行漸遠，歌琵一直努力達成父親的理想，在競爭賽場中往上爬，但她究竟想要什麼呢？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.

各界推薦

各界推薦 "Maroo is deeply in tune with the sensory experiences of being on the court, from the sound of a ball ricocheting off the wall of an adjacent court to the “soft throbbing” through a player’s body when playing and hitting well . . . The lingering power of Maroo’s novel is the way she depicts the possibility that on the court, there is the chance to find some modicum of grace, however temporary.―Spencer Gaffney, Washington Square Review"Profoundly resonant . . . A remarkable book in how it deals with that time, drifting forwards, backwards, sometimes superimposing different moments upon each other. To that end, it also contains some of the best sports writing I’ve read since Eimear Ryan’s Holding Her Breath . . . In the act of making books, writers make choices on every line, with every word. This is a debut in which Chetna Maroo gets every choice right."―Danny Denton, The Irish Times“Polished and disciplined . . . The beauty of Maroo’s novel lies in [its] unfolding, the narrative shaped as much by what is on the page as by what’s left unsaid . . . In this graceful novel, the game of squash becomes a way into Gopi’s grief and her attempts to process it.”―Ivy Pochoda, The New York Times Book Review“Subtle and elegant . . . 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.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Combining the precision and the efficiency of an athlete with the mysteries of childhood loss and memory, Western Lane is a novel in which we linger on every breathing line and relish every close observation. What an exceptionally talented writer Chetna Maroo is!”―Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

作者介紹

作者介紹 Chetna MarooChetna 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.

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