Australia’s rising star for smart, warm and witty fiction, Jessica Dettmann, explores paths not taken, second chances, friendship and love in her latest offering, Your Friend and Mine.
Dettmann’s wonderfully relatable Your Friend and Mine is for every woman that has looked up and wondered where the past decade or two has gone, and whether she’s made the right choices in the juggle of family, work and life.
When Margot receives an email from her best friend, Tess, it comes as a shock. After all, Tess has been dead for over twenty years.
At once, Margot is catapulted back to 2000, meeting the cool confident English backpacker visiting Sydney, where their intense friendship led to plans to travel back to Europe together.
But then Margot fell in love with Johnny, they opened a restaurant together and had a baby. Margot never made it to London, and Tess tragically died from ovarian cancer. The guilt Margot felt about letting her friend down has never completely subsided.
Now Tess is providing Margot with the means to fly to London and have the trip they never got to do together. But there are stipulations to Tess’s beyond-the-grave generosity – Margot must scatter her ashes and carry out ‘tasks’ in the company of Leo, Tess’s stepbrother.
Margot can’t help but compare the dreams and aspirations of the girl who partied with Tess to the bored, exhausted woman she has become. How could Tess have predicted that Margot would need a second chance to get on that plane? And are the tasks Tess set her designed to shake things up so dramatically? With Dettmann’s trademark wisdom, warmth and wit, Your Friend and Mine asks whether
Jessica Dettmann is the author of four novels and one book for children. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her family and her two cats. Before becoming a writer, she was a book editor. Even before that she once worked as the City of Sydney Christmas Angel, sitting on top of the Town Hall in a gown that reached the street, almost exclusively so she would have an interesting job to mention if she ever had the opportunity to write an author bio.
Your Friend and Mine is published by Atlantic Books Australia and is available from all leading book sellers including QBD Books.
Image: Your Friend and Mine – courtesy of Atlantic Books Australia