One of the most assured blessings of this life is a best friend. A person who always has your back, wants the very best for you and is with you throughout the many  vagaries that this life throws at you. The highs and lows. The soaringly good times and the gut-wrenching valleys.

Such a friend was the Herculean-like (in the way she lived life at full-throttle, with infinitely expansive gusto and little forbearance) Tess Bramley, to Margot Chalke.

Margot is the chief protagonist (formidably smart and brash but inwardly fragile) in stellar Australian author, Jessica Dettmann’s, latest spectacular novel, Your Friend and Mine.

In the eternally hip and thrumming city of Sydney (Australia), restaurant owner Margot discovers a peculiar and entirely unexpected email addressed to her. Tess Bramley is listed as being the subject of the email (not the sender as Margot initially thought). The life-altering twist in this scenario is that Tess (Margot’s best friend) has been dead for twenty years, having died at age twenty-five from a cause linked to ovarian cancer.

First though, the back story of Margot and Tess’s lives and friendship. Margot, at eighteen, had plans to have a gap year before possibly attending university. A job in a pub “near (her) house in Balmain (inner Sydney)” would be the the precursor for her to “save up and head to London and Europe as soon as she could afford it”.

Thus Margot came to work at The Acorn as a waitress, where the sparkling Tess (a twenty-one year old English girl who spoke as if she was “slightly posh” and had just completed an acting degree and was experiencing life in warmer climes than back home) was working behind the bar.

Margot and Tess soon became inseparable. Laughing a lot and dreaming of a future that beckoned warmly. For Margot, “Tess was the coolest person she’d ever met, and she wanted to be her friend forever”.

Tess desperately wanted Margot to move to London with her and for the two of them to share a flat and wonderful adventures together. Life, however, got in the way when Margot met and moved in with the older Johnny, a chef. When Johnny and Margot opened the flamboyantly successful restaurant, Manger, when Margot was twenty-one, and baby Augie comes along, Margot’s elusive dreams of a London odyssey evaporated just like “that”.

When Tess was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Margot found herself still unable to journey to London. She had baby Augie and so on.

Now at the age of forty-two, Margot finds herself, upon responding to the email, on the telephone talking to a solicitor in London, Harold Castafiore, who has been given directions from Tess, before she died, to give a letter to Margot but (and here’s the kicker), not until twenty years after her death. 

The letter from Tess, beyond the grave, to Margot partly reads “Will you do something for me? I’m going to leave some money for you. ….It’s for you to fly to London. I have a horrible feeling you won’t have been yet (correct!). You’ll have been so busy with Johnny and the restaurant, and now Augie, and statistically one point five further children. We never managed our trip, did we? And now we probably won’t …So I want you to come to London now when you get this. When you arrive there will be more letters from me. ……And in the letters are some things I want you to do for me. …..They’re just things I haven’t managed to do myself because of all the dying”.

So Margot finds herself travelling to and readily acquainted with the bustling metropolis of London, some twenty years after she had hoped to travel there. An old friend of Tess’s, Leo (a none-too-keen supply teacher, and originally an archaeologist) is to accompany Margot on her ‘errands’ for Tess. These include such ‘jobs’ as sprinkling Tess’s ashes under a seat in a park where Tess had her first kiss, sending some of her ashes out to sea on a viking boat and sprinkling some ashes under the “ghost seats” (“two seats (are) free at all times for (the) resident ghosts” at “the Palace Theatre in West End”). There is also some “mudlarking” that Margot and Leo are instructed by Tess in one of her letters to them to do. More adventures and requests from Tess are also experienced by Margot and Leo.

What joyful utterances and also tragic tales are espoused by Tess in her letters to Margot and Leo? What details of her life has she kept hidden from them that are heartbreakingly written of in her letters?

Tess was always up for a laugh, but was she also a terribly sad person inside?

As she gets to read all of Tess’s letters (including Tess’s advice for her life now), will Margot rethink her unsatisfactory relationship with Johnny and the vice-like grip and crushing weight of the restaurant they run day after day? Tess never liked Johnny and thought that Margot could do better. Was Tess’s opinion of Johnny justified?

What will Margot do with her feelings for the divorced Leo?

Will Margot ever go back to her life in Sydney, or will she continue to travel now that she knows how wonderful the world truly is?

Jessica has written a novel that overflows with great wisdom, formidable insight, sharp observations of the human psyche and condition and mountains of intelligence.

Themes of friendship, love, grief, youthful dreams and ambitions, betrayal and abuse (you’ll have to read the book to find out which types) are covered expertly.

Pages of this book broke my heart and other pages made me feel like singing with joy.

All great books make one reflect and think, even after the last page is turned. A huge shout-out to my best friend from school, Meghan. We agreed at the age of seventeen to meet by the right hand side of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on New Year’s Eve in 1999. I never made it. I hope you weren’t waiting for me Meghan!

My parents had their ‘gap year’ in Europe/the United Kingdom/Ireland when they were fifty-seven, so dreams can come true. And even if they don’t, the world is still a beautiful and breathtaking place (a lot of it anyway).

Bravo Jessica! This book caused me to think about friendship and those we love and have loved in our life. Whether we get a happily ever after in life or not, Margot’s and Tess’s journeys in this world remind us to seize life and enjoy it (as much as possible). As my mother has said to me “If someone gives you an opportunity, grab it with both hands”.

I loved Your Friend and Mine. A thoughtful, joyful and also sombre book. You won’t take life for granted after reading this one of a kind novel. Jessica’s latest novel is a  great achievement and a good book to read over the Christmas holidays. Five stars.