Publication date: February 17th 2024
Genres: Adult, Comedy, Contemporary, Romance

Synopsis:

Sometimes your friends break your heart the most.

Maggie Lomax dodged the most painful moment of her life, but her eccentric best friend Alexandra isn’t going to let her get away that easy. High School might finally be over, but they still need to clean up the mess left behind.

Things look grim, until Maggie meets Adam Moon, a handsome foreign student and sweet, kind soul who’s just as messed up as her. The only problem is he disappeared, and nobody knows what happened to him.

An unusual offer from an old school acquaintance to travel abroad may be a chance for Maggie to move on. New sights, new sounds and new adventures may be just what she needs, but the past has a way of catching up with her, and so does Alexandra. Maggie may find her guy, but it could be at the worst possible time.

This contemporary romantic black comedy travels the world, hopping islands, traversing continents, sailing oceans. It tells a big tale from small intimate ones. The story is set on the sails of courage, flying a flag to joy and friendship, heartbreak and love.

Excerpt

Dear Maggie,

As I’m sending this snail-mail anyway, I thought I’d include this note. Sitting down at my old typewriter, I had an eerie feeling of Deja-vu, because we were once pen-pals. I’m trying to block that thought out with the hard thwack of the ink on paper, because I can’t stand to remember anything from high school.

Let’s just address the largest elephant in the room: that I’m absolutely furious with you. Not because you involved me in this nonsense, or even because you kept all this from me in the first place, but simply because you gave Sophie an opportunity to do something that I would have killed for.

I could have used all that money to visit the religious shrines of Burma, live in Tokyo as an exotic prostitute, spend time in an opium den in Marrakesh, or maybe just stay right here and not work for a few years. The fact that Sophie pissed it all up the wall, and you are now the one graced with the chance to engage in risky behavior in the Orient, appalls me greatly. That you may even lose a finger or two is just salt in my wounds.

Half of me wanted to let you rot over there, but I have far bigger betrayals to deal with right now. I can’t even give you the cold shoulder while helping you, because the sad truth is that for the sake of my sanity, I need unburden myself on someone and I can’t risk boring the people around me. They’d probably think I was having some sort of delusional episode if I ranted to them like this.

I bumped into Sophie a while back. She said she was in town for only a few days. We agreed to meet for lunch, but she never showed up. She ignored my messages, and I supposed she had left again. A few weeks later I get a postcard from you with a hysterical letter stapled to it about a situation you both concealed from me all this time.

So you needed to know where she was, and in order to find out, you turned to me, an impoverished loon. Your instincts must be pretty good, because I found her, but even with my connection to her family and friends it took enormous effort. She said she would be returning to Indonesia, but her brother said she was off hitchhiking. Nobody else had any idea where she was. I tried everything I could think of. I even tried being really uncool by visiting Grandma’s house to use the internet, but still got nothing.

All hope was not lost, however. Through my network of traveler kids, itinerant hippies, oogles, drifters and indigent druggies, I have chased Sophie for months. I never lost the trail, but even when I got close, she was always still ten steps ahead. First, she had just left a commune with friends in Hippieland, then she was going from town to town playing her fiddle with a traveling bluegrass band called Billy Jeans and the Trouser Boys, then she was apple-picking, and then I wasn’t so sure.

Maybe she was on the run from you, or maybe she was just a nomadic person. Maybe it was both. It seemed she would always be out of my reach, until finally came the break I needed. Her mother called and said there was someone holding a meeting to track down acquaintances of Bram’s, and Clara asked that I not attend.

I explained that I had to go because there was a possibility someone who knew Sophie would be at this meeting, and I was hoping they could put me in touch with her. Wankers call that sort of thing “networking”.

I went and scanned the room for people who seemed familiar. That stupid girl who spoke at the funeral was there; you remember the one with all the feathers? Her name is Amythyst with two Ys for some reason. Perhaps her parents can’t spell, or perhaps they were just trying to make the word ‘rhythm’ feel less special. I always thought she never met Bram, but in speaking to her for only a few moments I came to realize she knew him very well. This has happened over and over again over the years. He must have had about ten best friends who I was totally unaware of.

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About the Author

Francesca Vespa studied linguistics. She is neurodivergent, lives in South Australia with two incredible children, as well as cat named Simon and a dog named Diesel. Seven Perfect Days is her debut novel.

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