An irresistible new voice alive to the choices and confusions of youth, and the messiness of learning how to adult
LONER
by Georgina Young
Text Publishing, 2020
LONER moves beyond the expected boundaries of young adult fiction. It is an intimate, comic novel about learning how to be, and how to not be, a person in this world. It is about finding and creating yourself—as many times as it takes. Lona spends her days developing photographs in the dark room of the art school she dropped out of. She spends her nights DJ-ing the roller disco at Planet Skate. She is in inexplicable, debilitating love with a bespectacled, Doctor Who-obsessed former classmate. She is in comfortable, platonic love with her best friend, Tabitha. When Lona’s grandfather moves into her home, she finds herself bonding with him as she watches his health decline. When she is promoted to manager of checkout three in her supermarket job, she argues for a demotion to trolley-girl. When she meets a bass-playing, cello-shredding, charming-as-all-hell suitor, she is thrown by somehow finding herself in a romantic relationship with another human being. Lona doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows what she doesn’t want—well, some of the time.
Georgina was born in 1995 and lives in Melbourne. She has been published in a number of anthologies and literary magazines..