Friendship is such a huge part of the teen experience, yet relatively few books for young people focus on it as a key theme. And while romantic and familial relationships are also important, friendship occupies a unique place in our lives.

As an author, it’s a topic I’m obsessed with. My teen debut Oh My Gods featured a family of Greek gods on earth, causing all sorts of chaos for my main character Helen. But it was Helen’s friendship group that, for me, were the beating heart of the novel. 

Friends, or lack of them, have been a very important theme in my life. I moved from diverse North London to a much whiter city in the East Midlands when I was ten, and after the move I struggled to make friends as a quiet, bookish child. Black and mixed race kids were few and far between in my new school, and I spent my teen years very conscious of the overwhelming whiteness of my friendship groups. 

Then I moved back to London. Even though I was happy to be back in a place where more people looked like me (and there were more than two Black hair shops), no one prepared me for another crucial fact of adulthood: making friends as a grown-up is hard. Even more so if you’re introverted, work from home and missed out on that vital socialising period at university (I dropped out in the first year).