At seventeen, Jacklin Bates is all grown up. She's dropped out of school. She's living with her runaway
sister, Trudy, and she's in secret, obsessive love with Luke, who doesn't love her back. She's stuck in Mobius-a dying town with the macabre suicide forest its only attraction-stuck working in the roadhouse and babysitting her boss's demented father.
A stranger sets up camp in the forest and the boy next door returns; Jack's father moves into the shed and her mother steps up her campaign to punish Jack for leaving, too. Trudy's brilliant fa?ade is cracking and Jack's only friend, Astrid, has done something unforgivable.
Jack is losing everything, including her mind. As she struggles to hold onto the life she thought she wanted, Jack learns that growing up is complicated-and love might be the biggest mystery of all.
Vikki Wakefield's first young adult novel, All I Ever Wanted, won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, as did her second novel, Friday Brown, in 2014. Friday Brown was also an Honour Book, Children's Book Council of Australia, in 2013. Among other awards, it was shortlisted for the prestigious Prime inister's Awards, in 2013. Vikki lives in the Adelaide foothills with her family.
'Wakefield has captured small-town life perfectly. There is the stifling sense of everyone knowing everyone, but also the boredom that comes from being a teenager with nowhere to go. In these claustrophobic conditions, she explores love, death and identity.' Books + Publishing
'I adored this book.' Alpha Reader
'This is one of the most memorable YA books I've ever read. Original, real, startling and beautiful.' Cath Crowley, author of Graffiti Moon, on Friday Brown
'With a heart-swelling conclusion, Wakefield's novel contains characters so palpable you can imagine passing them in the street.' Weekend Australian on Friday Brown
'Set against an Australian landscape brimming with the gothic, and full of elegiac beauty and intelligent insights into the human mind, this is a stunning contribution to young adult fiction, and one that will rate as highly memorable among both mature young-adult readers and adults.' Australian Bookseller & Publisher on Friday Brown
'A tense, multilayered tale about loyalty, memory and survival.' Kirkus Reviews on Friday Brown
