No-One’s No One is a coming of age novel about friends, bands, and DIY culture, as an aimless seventeen-year-old finds something to pour his heart into. Thomas has just finished exams at college and has a long summer ahead of him, and longer. As everyone else makes plans, his main plans are to continue going along to the weekly Car Boot Sale with his dad, where he finds secondhand cassettes to develop his musical education, and doesn’t think about his estranged best friend. When he meets a new guy at the Boot Sale, Thomas’ world starts to widen, far more than he originally expects, and soon he has found a world of house shows and bands he couldn’t have dreamed of.
This is a book thoroughly infused with music, not just rock and pop and punk as you might expect, but also jazz and classical, and a love of discovery. In fact, that’s what the book really is about: discovery of not just new music and books and films, but of friends and what the world might be. Alongside this, it’s about queer discovery, and the importance of all the steps that open your eyes to the world and who you could be in it. Thomas has fairly secluded and sheltered life, particularly for someone who is almost eighteen, and the novel delves into what he needs to go beyond that, and to take up something for himself rather than because his parents thought he might like to do it. This positions the novel in that space coming of age books often inhabit, the time after teen fiction when things aren’t neat, they are messy and experimental and uncertain, and it embraces this, as Thomas learns from others and also passes on recommendations to other people, full of community spirit and sharing and pitching in.
There’s something so fun about books that are a love letter to a scene like No-One’s No-One is (and Thomas is highly aware of this, wanting to be part of an artistic scene and have that community), and the reader gets to experience the DIY house show scene like Thomas does: as an overwhelming, exciting experience that changes the whole feel of the novel. From the drifting feeling of the start to the hope and disappointment in love Thomas experiences to the fresh promise that makes up the ending, this is a book that offers a hopeful, realistic queer story of finding the right people (and a few wrong ones along the way).
Fiendfully Reading 
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