Between You and Me (Joanna Horton, Ultimo)

Numerous authors have invited comparisons to Sally Rooney, and Between You and Me undoubtedly will too. Similar to Frances and Bobbi in Rooney’s breakthrough debut Conversations with Friends, 25-year-old best friends Elisabeth and Mari meet an older man at a function and become increasingly entangled in his world of privilege and comfort. Jack is a tenured academic 20 years their senior, and his intoxication with them both blurs ethical boundaries and transgresses the loyalty and love they have for one another. In the same vein as Rooney’s characters, Elisabeth and Mari affect irony to mask their feelings and conversations are battlegrounds for philosophical arguments around capitalism and the precarity of labour. In a riposte to Australian literature mainly set in Sydney and Melbourne, Between You and Me takes place in Brisbane, ‘the world’s best in-between city’, and traverses several years. But it’s the first two-thirds of the novel that are most successful at foregrounding the dynamics of this unlikely ménage à trois, where a dark undercurrent of danger, sexual tension and foreshadowing imbues every action. Between You and Me evokes Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach in its depiction of unrequited desire and queer female friendship, Kavita Bedford’s Friends & Dark Shapes in its effortless inhabiting of what it means to be young, and Diana Reid’s Love and Virtue in its exploration of class, sex and power.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews