Richard Owain Roberts

HELLO FRIEND WE MISSED YOU is a deeply poignant and bleakly comic debut novel about loneliness, the 'violent revenge thriller' category on Netflix, solipsism, rural gentrification, Jack Black, and learning to exist in the least excruciating way possible. Its story of depression and death on the small Welsh island of Môn, of people armed with every social media completely failing to communicate, is far, far funnier than it has any right to be. It's also, ultimately, extremely moving. An incredible debut novel from a truly unique prose stylist.

Hello Friend We Missed You

Wikipedia-obsessed cats, deleted tweets, James Franco's mother, west Wales, and Barcelona. Both bleak and joyously optimistic, All The Places We Lived is a collection of disparate, yet inextricably connected stories that are bound by the common threads that exist amongst young people in and out of love with each other and life in the twenty-first century. Whether keenly awaiting an imagined terror attack in a twenty-third floor glass box hotel, wandering Catalonian art galleries, or two AM jogging on pitch-black A-roads, solitude is never a truly concrete experience. There is always someone else: someone to buy a dilapidated rural house with, someone to laugh with, someone to get fired with, someone to fight with, someone to ride bikes with. Richard Owain Roberts has assembled a debut collection of contemporary fiction that is minimalist, confrontational, delicate, and, relentlessly, the absolute unfiltered truth.

Richard Owain Roberts

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