The Nocturnals (Frances Whiting, HarperCollins)

Frances Whiting’s third novel, The Nocturnals, follows 5 teenagers in 1997 who promise “to love each other wholly” as they become inseparable in their final year of school. The group calls themselves the Nocturnals, likening their friendship to The Breakfast Club “if they had met at night” and were Australian. Pitched as adult literary fiction, the novel would sit just as comfortably on a YA shelf. It draws on familiar high-school caricatures – the dux, the jock, the waifish pixie dream girl – before gradually complicating them by filling in their blanks with hopes, dreams and colour. The friends initially seem inseparable, but the narrative steadily pushes towards their fracture. The novel begins with charismatic ringleader Hunter calling to “get his friends together” for the first time in 10 years; the reason why becomes the engine of the plot. Whiting’s greatest strength is her use of close third-person omniscient narration, which moves between perspectives in each chapter without disrupting the narrative voice. The story balances macro-scale reflection with emotional intimacy, reminding readers that “we’re all small, in terms of our size we’re 500 trillion, trillion times smaller than the observable universe”. Despite 2 heavy-handed plot points, it’s the lovable characters that carry the novel through. The Nocturnals will appeal to adults raised on Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi and fans of Imbi Neeme or Victoria Hannan.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Emily Westmoreland was the Penguin Random House Young Bookseller of the Year 2023. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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