Friday Brown is the breathtaking second novel from the author of the award-winning All I Ever Wanted.
Children's Book Council of Australia Honour Book, 2013
Seventeen-year-old Friday Brown is on the run, running to escape memories of her mother and of the family curse. And of a grandfather who'd like her to stay.
She's lost, alone and afraid. Silence, a street kid, finds Friday and she joins him in a gang led by beautiful, charismatic Arden. When Silence is involved in a crime, the gang escapes to a ghost town in the outback.
In Murungal Creek, the town of never leaving, Friday must face the ghosts of her past. She will learn that sometimes you have to stay to finish what you started - and often, before you can find out who you are, you have to become someone you were never meant to be.
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, 2013. Among other awards, it was shortlisted for the prestigious Prime Minister's Awards, 2013. Her new novel, Inbetween Days, will be published in October 2015. Vikki lives in the Adelaide foothills with her family.
'I don't know whether it was icy weather or the sheer emotional tension of the story, but the night I stayed up to finish Friday Brown I was shivering. Every single character in this book is utterly fascinating, and their tangled relationships create so much force...Set against an Australian landscape brimming with the gothic, and full of elegaic 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
'Each time I read a Vikki Wakefield novel I get this tiny ache in my heart because I'm already missing her gutsy characters.' Melina Marchetta
'Every single character in this book is utterly fascinating. And their tangled relationships create so much force.' Australian Bookseller & Publisher
'[Vikki Wakefield] definitely brings something vital and individual to the genre - writing about tough but lonely girls, the friendships that save them and the past that haunts them...I loved this book from the bottom of my heart to the tips of my toes.' Alpha Reader
'Wakefield's first novel, All I Ever Wanted, revealed her as an important voice in Australian literature. This beautiful, brave book cements that position. Written for a teenage audience, it has the scope for a broader appeal.' Readings Monthly
'That she's a new shining star for Australian YA is a given. But her explorations in Friday Brown are urban and fantastical, coming-of-age mixed with thriller. This is a hard novel, and that's partly what makes it so good, but there's something magic here too...What's also unmistakeable is that Vikki Wakefield writes the tough stuff...Her characters are so vivid and endearing, or vicious and infuriating that she makes you feel everything down to your bones. 5/5' Alpha Reader
