Book Review: Waiting On a Friend by Natalie Adler

Set in the mid-1980s, Natalie Adler’s Waiting on a Friend centres Renata, a lesbian living in New York’s East Village. Renata has lost countless friends to a mysterious new disease she now knows is AIDS but her grief is not the only thing she has to contend with because she can see ghosts, and many of them are now the very people she is grieving.

Pre-order Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler ( Hive Books / Book Kind )

In the summer of 1984, when her best friend Mark passes away, Renata assumes she’ll see him again too in ghostly form, so she can finally have her chance to say goodbye. But when Mark doesn’t appear, Renata is left ‘waiting on a friend’.

In her disappointment and mounting grief, Renata turns her attention to another problem; a mysterious, police-like team trying to rid her neighbour of anything otherworldly. Alongside a group of eccentric, lovable queer friends and ex-lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against these ghost catchers. She will do all she can to protect the memories of her friends and others lost to the HIV epidemic in New York.

Waiting on a Friend is Ghosts meets FX’s Pose, offering a retelling of queer history. The novel has an edge of fantasy but a narrative still rooted in reality and historic fact, opening the past’s pages up even wider for a new generation of the community, with its unique and intriguing take on this dark period in our collective history.

The novel explores a range of topics including HIV/AIDS, sexuality, gender identity, addiction and, of course, grief. Within the deepness of grief though, Natalie Adler’s writing also offers beams of light that showcase the queer community’s resilience that carried us into the future. The novel is laced with morbid, dark humour reflective of very human nature and coping mechanism. Bet, there are also lighter moments of flirting, sex and romance, and joyful bursts of quirky, caring friendship even amidst the pain of loss.

Filled with flawed, relatable and lovable characters, Adler’s work celebrates chosen family with a fresh burst of youthfulness. A story that is as equally heartbreaking as it is heartwarming, Waiting on a Friend is a triumphantly cathartic novel filled with humour, warmth, empathy, and compassion. It is a novel that reclaims the spirit of resistance that is deep-rooted in queer community.

With thanks to Netgalley for the review copy of this book.

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