After giving it a wee bit of thought, I consider this a novella. The Sci-Fi awards people are very specific (but give a 20% leeway) about their categories. Novellas “have a word count between 17,500 and 40,000 words. At 250 words per page, this equates to 70 to 160 pages.” https://web.archive.org/web/20090319043837/http://sfwa.org/awards/faq.htm

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Western Lane 
By Chetna Naroo 
2023 /149 pp 
Read by Maya Soroya 4h 21m
Rating – 8 / novella 21st Century lit
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So 149 pages is a wee bit long, but it fits. Also, I think with a novella there’s to be one basic plot or story-arc, no subplots, no backstory, just a few memories. A short story likely focuses on one incident, novella might have the one plot, but involve several incidents. Finally, a novella is usually a pretty straightforward story focusing on personal emotional growth of some kind rather than on any big social theme or family saga. Western Lane I’ll give it some leeway.

Western Lane’s main character is Gopi, an 11-year old girl of Indian descent who lives with her family in London, grieving their recently deceased mother. Gopi has two older sisters who are also bereaved, but it seems it’s her father for whom the loss of his wife is overwhelming. And he can’t raise 3 girls on his own working as a self-employed electrician. A friend suggests the sport of squash which is popular and the family has been playing casually for years and Gopi seems to have a talent for it.  

The problem is that Gopi’s father escapes into his daughters’ training as does she. He becomes consumed by the girls’ progress as it seems Gopi might be headed for competition level. This helps to an extent but it can also be a path to denial when he seems to start “communicating” with Mom, seeing her in the living room and so on. Gopi calls her uncle, Dad’s brother, who comes with his wife from Edinburgh and they try to sort things out. A wrinkle lies in the fact that the son of the white owner acts as coach, but he and Gopi get attracted to each other. 

It’s a great story, very sensitively told with Gopi’s emotional health being primary, but with a lot of concern on many sides, for Dad.