‘Jessie had said they should go at midnight. It’s the gods’ time, she said, narrowing her eyes dramatically. Anything could happen.’

‘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, 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.

As this stunning debut moves back and forth in time, and Ali’s secrets are forced into the light, Kate Ryan asks profound questions about responsibility and blame, and, ultimately, about love.



‘An exquisite study of the dark, liminal space between words and acts, and the necessary redrafting of our life stories. This is a golden book.’
-Myfanwy Jones, author of Leap

Kate Ryan writes fiction and nonfiction and her work has appeared in publications including New Australian Writing, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, the Griffith Review, and Best Australian Stories. Her picture books were published by Penguin and Lothian. She won the Writers Prize in the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature and the novella category in the 2017 Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards. Her work has been recognised in others including the Josephine Ulrick, Calibre, Elizabeth Jolley, and Boroondara awards. The Golden Book is her first novel. As well as writing, she works as an editor, teacher, manuscript assessor, and writing mentor.