Frankie and Joely

Frankie and Joely

Frankie and Joely are best friends. They love each other like no one else can. But when a summer break in the country brings fresh distractions, simmering jealousies and festering secrets – can their friendship survive?

It's the holidays and, together, Frankie and Joely board a train and escape the city and their mums for a week of freedom. But when Joely introduces Frankie to her country cousins, Thommo and Mack, it soon becomes clear that something other than the heat is getting under their skin.

As the temperature rises and the annual New Years' Eve party looms closer, local boy Rory stirs things up even more and secrets start to blister. Suddenly the girls' summer getaway is not panning out how either of them imagined.

Will they still be -Frankie and Joely' by the end of their holiday?

In Frankie and Joely Nova Weetman set out to explore the complex relationships that often exist between teenage girls and their best friends, using the hot, dry backdrop of an Australian country town in the middle of summer.

-My female friendships are really important to me, but they are also sometimes highly tricky and complicated things. After watching how my daughter deals with her friendships, in a much more upfront and transparent way than I ever have, I decided to investigate what it is between two best friends who love each other deeply. It is perhaps the thing that intrigues me most – the notion that you can love someone deeply while being very aware that you're hurting them, because of jealousy, rivalry or just plain old competition.'

Nova Weetman's prose has appeared in various literary magazines including Kill Your Darlings, Island, Tirra Lirra, Mslexia and Overland. She has written for the children's television series Pixel Pinkie and Buzz Bumble and wrote the short films Ripples and Mr Wasinski's Song, for which she received an AWGIE nomination for best short screenplay and the Best Short Film Award from the Melbourne International Film Festival. She has also won the HarperCollins Fellowship and the FAW Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript. Nova lives with her partner, a playwright, and their two children in Melbourne. Frankie and Joely is her second novel for young adults. Her first, The Haunting of Lily Frost (UQP, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2014 Aurealis Awards for Best Young Adult Novel.

Frankie and Joely
UQP
Author: Nova Weetman
ISBN: 9780702253638
RRP: $19.95