I was only halfway through Loner by Georgina Young when I sent a text message to one of my oldest friends telling her that she had to read it because it was like someone had stolen our uni years and put them in a book. Every word of this delightful novel felt real.

The story is about Lona – she has dropped out of her art course at uni, and while her best friend, Tab, immerses herself in university life, Lona works at Planet Skate on Friday nights and at a supermarket during the week. She has lost her creative direction (and questions whether it ever existed). There’s lots of angst.

It’s not enough to respond to a prompt. It’s not enough to subvert or to push back on the assessment criteria. Not when she relied on the rubric in the first place, to know what she should be pushing back on, to define the trajectory of her small artistic and conceptual rebellions.

And of course, there are relationships. Lona is secretly in love with a former classmate, but having never had a boyfriend, is unsure and tentative.

She hangs up at the end of their see you tomorrow-ing, and she’s confused and pleased and exhausted. She is not sure if she can sustain this thing, this feeling of bewildered happiness. It relies so much on someone else and Lona has never relied so much on someone else. It is terrifying.

My description of the plot has failed to capture Lona, the person. She works hard to portray an attitude of detachment and cynicism, and yet the reader is privy to all that she longs for – to feel understood, loved, certain. Lona can’t quite articulate the things she wants, the things that she senses are part of her future but are yet unknown.

She is dubious about lace and pale pink and little love-hearts and anything that is aggressively feminine anyway. She cannot work out whether that means she has rejected the patriarchy or internalised it.

I’m sure that women in their forties were not Young’s target audience, but age is irrelevant when you capture the dynamics of friendship as perfectly as Young has. The unspoken shorthand and shared history between Lona and Tab is extraordinarily well done, and over and over I felt that Lona’s conversations with Tab could have been mine with friends (I had to take a pic as an example) –

While Loner examines big questions about identity, self-esteem, and ambition, it is the small details in this book that provide context and warmth. For example, in the beginning, Lona is living at home with her parents. Her grandfather has just moved in, no longer able to live independently – this parallel examination of people at different stages of life is so beautifully done, and when Lona moves into a share-house, her visits with her parents and grandfather are all the more poignant.

I loved this story – Lona’s vulnerabilities, uncertainty, and honesty is endearing, and Young’s dry sense of humour is exactly my thing.

Lona is feeling shit about things, both generally and specifically. (The stiffness in her shoulders, the twitch in her right eye, the amorphous shape of her future, the removal of Sliding Doors from Netflix.)

At home, Mum is making gin and tonics. Dad has just signed up for Spotify Premium and, as Lona feared he one day would, he has discovered Hamilton.

I hope this novel gets a look-in for the Stella Prize.

4/5 All the fun is in the detail.

It may be the sweet potato ice cream that he’s eating that is making George look so concerned, but Lona has a feeling it’s her.
“I feel like I should be one hundred percent honest with you before this goes any further,”she says. “I like chocolate ice cream. I like plain chips. I like toast with butter on it. Just butter, nothing else. I like Hugh Grant movies. I get mild sauce on my chicken at Nando’s. I drink vodka with cranberry juice. I’m bland. I enjoy my blandness. I delight in doing the same things over and over again.
George shakes his head. “I had you completely wrong.”
“Everyone does. Don’t let the air of arty pretentiousness deceive you…”