Jessie had said they should go at midnight. ‘It’s the gods’ time,’ she said, narrowing her eyes dramatically. ‘Anything could happen.’
It’s the 1980s, and in their small coastal town, Ali and her best friend, Jessie, are on the cusp. With ‘The Golden Book’, a journal of incantation and risk-taking as their record, they begin to chafe at the restrictions put on them by teachers, parents, and each other. Then Jessie suffers a devastating accident, and both their lives are forever changed.
When Ali is an adult, with a young daughter herself, the news of Jessie’s death brings back the intensity of that summer, forcing her to reckon with her own role in what happened to Jessie so many years ago.
Set in the NSW south coastal town of Bega during the 1980s, The Golden Book is a nostalgic, thought-provoking, and quietly devastating debut from Kate Ryan that asks profound questions about responsibility and blame, and, ultimately about love.
The novel follows Ali, now a teacher and mother, as she learns of the death of her childhood friend Jessie and begins to reflect on their relationship. As the story unfolds, Ryan dips back and forth between the past and the present to explore this friendship, sometimes doing so mid-paragraph and often without warning. While, from a lesser writer, the time shifts might have been disorienting, in Ryan’s capable hands it captures the fluidity of memories and the way they drift in and out of our consciousness. Piece by piece, we slowly learn what happened to Jessie all those years ago and the extent to which Ali still carries the scars of that trauma in adulthood.
The relationship between Ali and Jessie sits at the heart of this story. We’ve all had a friend like Jessie growing up – I certainly did. Where Ali is reserved and cautious, Jessie is a wild risk-taker who constantly breaks the rules and pushes the boundaries of their friendship. While their relationship is full of love, other more complex emotions also exist beneath the surface, including fear, jealousy, and even resentment. Through Ali and Jessie, Ryan has managed to portray the intense interplay of love, hate, and rivalry that exist within childhood friendships.
Written in visceral and immersive prose, The Golden Book is an exquisite and deeply resonant literary novel that captures the nostalgia, magic, and grittiness of youth. An incredible debut from Ryan.
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