The book we can't stop talking about.

By REBECCA SPARROW

“Oh my God, you HAVE to read this book.”

It’s been a while since I’ve uttered those words. Partly because I don’t read as many books as I used to. (Assuming we’re not counting Where Is The Green Sheep? which I read oh, about 300 million times a day. Dude, we both know you’re behind the bush sleeping. It’s getting old. Find a new hiding spot and takes some scurvy tablets while you’re at it.) But mostly because it’s not that often that I read a novel that leaves me DESPERATE to discuss it with someone else.

Walking on Trampolines by Frances Whiting is one of those novels.

It’s delicious. One of those rare reads that’s funny and warm and engaging. Better still the storyline stirs up as many questions as any book can.  Why? Because it’s an exquisite tale of female friendship in all its complicated, layered glory. It’s about that white hot intense bond between teenage girls who are BFFs. It’s about home and family and cups of tea and home-baked butter cake and what it’s like when your mother has depression. It’s about first love and true love and what happens when the people you love the most in the world betray you in the worst way possible. It’s about knowing when to forgive and when to walk away.

You have to read this book.

I’m obsessed with it. Mia is obsessed with it. Kate is obsessed with it. Lucy isn’t obsessed with it. But she will be. She just started reading it yesterday.

Here’s the official synopsis of Walking On Trampolines …

“From the day Annabelle Andrews sashays into her classroom, Tallulah ‘Lulu’ de Longland is bewitched: by Annabelle, by her family and their sprawling, crumbling house tumbling down to the river.

Their unlikely friendship intensifies through a secret language where they share confidences about their unusual mothers, first loves, and growing up in the small coastal town of Juniper Bay. Their lives become as entwined as Annabelle’s initials engraved beneath the de Longland kitchen table.

But the euphoria of youth rarely lasts,and the implosion that destroys their friendship leaves lasting scars and a legacy of self-doubt that haunts Lulu into adulthood.

Years later, Lulu is presented with a choice: remain the perpetual good girl who misses out, or finally step out from the shadows and do something extraordinary. And possibly unforgivable.”

You have to read this book. And then tell me whether you’re on Team Annabelle or Team Lulu.

To whet your appetite, Frances has given us permission to publish the prologue.  Trust us, you’ll be hooked.

His skin.

My fingers could trace the path it has travelled.

Comma-shaped scar on left knee – bike crash, ‘Red Demon’ dragster, 1974; stitches above right eyebrow – fin chop, Cabarita, 1982, faint outline of navy blue, home-made tattoo on left wrist – high school, my name.

I know this skin, I know how it feels, I know how it smells, I know every single inch of him.

Joshua Keaton.

He rolls towards me in the ocean of a bed we are lying in at the Hotel du Laurent, restless and hot beneath its cool sheets.

Little waves of nausea tumble through my stomach and my head aches at each throbbing temple – precursors, I know, to a hangover that could, as Simone would say, fell a buffalo.

I slip out of the bed and go to the bathroom to stare raccoon-eyed into the mirror and consider the girl who has done this thing.

There is something caught in my hair, small and rosy and round.

Confetti.

From the church yesterday, where we stood on the cobblestones, surrounded by women in hats and children squeezing through pin-striped legs.

My father had put his hand on my cheek just before we went in. ‘It will be all right, you know, Lulu,’ he had said – and it was.

When I entered the church, Josh had turned to look at me, and in that moment it all faded away, the sandalwood candles, the clutches of tiny pink rosebuds tied to the pews, and I

was back at the counter of Snow’s corner store, where Josh and I stood staring at each other with dumbstruck smiles on our sixteen-year-old faces.

I had walked up the aisle on the strength of that look, walked towards Josh determined, from this day forth, for better or worse, to think only about where we were heading, instead of always tugging at every detail of where we had been.

I slide back into the bed and Josh moves towards me, resting his head on my chest, where it rises and falls with my breath, his dark curls caught beneath my fingers, his arms reaching out for me in the half-light, his eyes sleepily opening to widen in horror.

‘Lulu,’ he says, ‘what the hell?’

He sits bolt upright in the bed and a torrent of swear words fall from his lips, raining down on us like yesterday’s confetti.

Because while I may have woken up in a tangle of just-married sheets beside Joshua Keaton and his all-too-familiar skin, I was not his bride.

You can buy Walking On Trampolines here. Or you can win a copy by filling out the form below and telling us, in 25 words or less – why you want to get yours hands on a copy of the book.

What book are you reading right now?  What’s the last book you couldn’t stop thinking about?