Conversations with Friends

This both has a first person narrator, Frances, who isn't exactly unreliable in what she tells us, but who has difficulty identifying her feelings, which makes her an unreliable friend overall. The key relationship is the one she has with her brilliant and well to to friend Bobbi who used to be her girlfriend but after an unresolved breakup is now her friend. It depicts their relationship with an older married couple whom they meet and develop feelings for, while perhaps never really getting to know well. The book's title is interesting in that you come to question each of the words making it up by the end. And all this, Frances also has an unexpected serious health crisis which helps you understand her emotions when you find out which of her friends she decides to disclose this fact to. It is a story of modern urban life, with texts and emails, unpaid internships and economic uncertainty with a traditional kind of coming of age theme. The time when Bobbi and Frances were a couple is not really told or shown but alluded to in reference to the events in the timeline, years later, and in the trauma it is associated with for Frances. The writing is carefully crafted and suggests nuances to the characters the narrator may not herself recognize.

The audiobook narration by Aoife McMahon is energetic and yet restrained as it portrays the voice of a closed-off character who does not have the knack of feeling her way through life. I would like to