Shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker prize 2020 Praise for HELLO FRIEND WE MISSED YOU: 'After a decade, the Not the Booker prize still has the ability to produce surprises. I would never have predicted that the most interesting and original book on this year’s shortlist would be something like Hello Friend We Missed You, because Richard Owain Roberts’ book is wonderfully unlike anything else ... I do believe we’ve found a gem.' The Guardian 'This is so, so good. You will no doubt read this book, as I did, with an ever-growing sense of appreciation and admiration for its wit, warmth, rhythm, poetry, and virtuoso display of a writer in complete and audacious command of his material. What is at root a simple boy-meets-girl story is transmuted into something uniquely astonishing through a wild and intrepid imagination. To repeat: this novel is so, soooo good.' – Niall Griffiths

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 Mon, 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.