Radio Silence

Frances Janvier has her future mapped out: top grades, a place at Cambridge, no distractions. Underneath the plan, she draws, and she is a devoted listener of Universe City, a hugely popular podcast. When its anonymous creator asks her to be its artist, she says yes.

The creator is Aled Last, a quiet boy from her own neighbourhood. The two become close quickly. With Aled, Frances has room to be herself, and Aled has a reason to keep making the show.

Then Aled's identity is exposed online, and the secrets both of them have kept start to come apart. Frances has to decide what she owes her friend. She also has to face what happened to Aled's twin sister Carys, who left home years earlier, and ask whether her own carefully planned path is one she wants.

This is a contemporary young adult novel set in England, with a cast of queer and mixed-heritage characters. It deals with friendship, identity and the weight of academic pressure, and it touches on emotional abuse within a family. It was written after Solitaire and shares a universe with the Heartstopper stories by the same author.