Hello everyone, what's happening?

This is the Other People podcast.

I'm Brad Listy in Los Angeles.

It's good to be with you.

Thank you for listening.

Today on the program, my guest is Chetna Maru,

author of the debut novel, Western Lane.

You know, it wasn't what I had intended. I wasn't consciously thinking about the immigrant

experience when I was, you know, writing my first drafts. I kind of feel my way through the

writing and I think that anything that I'm interested in just comes in.

So I think it is definitely in there and there is these questions of how the generations of the

older generations of the family have a certain life and the girls have a different

life and there's a tension between those two, but also tensions between the communities and the

book, which I think is a very common experience in Britain in this kind of town, a multiracial town in the 1980s.

And there was this, there was integration, but there was also conflict between the communities.

And I mean the white community and the Indian community.

Okay, that was Chetnamaroo.

Her new novel, Western Lane, is now available from Farrar,

Strauss, and Giroux. It is her debut. It is a wonderful book. And it is, uh, it's a grief

novel. It's the story of a bereaved family in Britain in the late 1980s, a Jane family, a father,

and three girls grieving the loss of their wife and mother and adjusting to their new reality.

So what do I say about this book?

...