Golden Days is the story of the intense late-teen 1995 friendship between bookish Becky and star-dusted Zoe Golden—music, clubs, art collaboration, spirituality, sex—and what happens when one terrifying night changes their lives and destroys their friendship forever.
We meet first-person protagonist Becky again seventeen years later, drunk for days and mourning the end of her picture-perfect marriage. When Zoe reappears, Becky is forced—with the help of her oldest friend, Meg—to reconsider her interpretation of that summer’s tragic events, where blame lies and her true nature.
‘On the surface, Golden Days is an entertaining page-turner. Not too far below that surface, it’s a story that shows us two scabs on two different bodies. One character has let that scab turn into a scar, the other has picked at it daily without knowing, bleeding a bit more every time. In its best moments, it invites the audience to think about whether they’re scarred or bleeding’, writes Sam Brooks in The Spinoff.
‘There is much to admire in this novel. Auckland of the mid-90s is brought to life with vibrant specificity, a fact that makes me realise how rare such a thing is. Reading it is like being chucked into the Pavement Party People page – all skinny young women with hair bunches, floor-dragging skirts, mesh tops and bare midriffs, angel wings and glitter’, writes Rachael King in Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books.
