Abbey Lay’s debut novel was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Lead Us Not is an intriguing, heartbreaking depiction of the complexities of female friendship and the emotional toll of ghosting.
In her final year at a Catholic Girls’ School, Millie gets a new neighbour. A classmate she has never spoken to, Olive, invites Millie into her life, and they connect from the proximity of two bedrooms facing each other, divided by a fence. The friendship strengthens quickly. The two find mutual obsessions and share vulnerabilities, talking about topics they’ve never talked about with anyone else before. The burgeoning friendship is invigorating and interesting.
Until one day, after Millie gets back home from a drama retreat, it suddenly ends. There is seemingly no reason, at least none that Millie can guess.
The novel recalls Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage both in terms of the central plot point – an unexpected ghosting – and the sparse loneliness suffered by the main character. Millie becomes depressed, bouncing between wondering what she did wrong and feeling as though she was wronged.
Millie is sidetracked from her schooling, her other friends, her family, her boyfriends, because of her obsession with Olive. And it doesn’t help that once Olive ghosts her, she is still everywhere anyway. They avoid each other’s eyelines at school and they know each other are right next door, but they can no longer reach out.
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Lead Us Not is a powerful rendering of psychological unease, and fast, intimate friendships that suddenly vanish. It is wonderfully relatable with the archetypes of the Australian high school – the overachiever, the person who does well without trying, the drama kid. And it’s one of those books that leave you stewing over your own experiences of times when things went wrong and you have no idea why.
Lead Us Not, Abbey Lay
Publisher: (Viking) Penguin
ISBN: 9781761340680
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304pp
Publication date: 5 March 2024
RRP: $34.99
