Alice Oseman’s Radio Silence follows teens caught between the pressure-cooker world of elite schooling and the liberating pull of online creativity. Across classrooms, bedrooms, and a cult-favorite podcast called Universe City, they test the boundaries of identity, ambition, and the kind of love that doesn’t have to be romantic to be life-changing. What binds them is not grades or prestige, but the courage to be seen—and to see one another—clearly.
Main Characters
Frances Janvier
Frances Janvier is the novel’s narrator and the school’s high-achieving Head Girl, outwardly defined by perfect grades and a Cambridge dream she’s been trained to want. In private, she is “Toulouse,” the fan artist behind Universe City, where her creativity and humor thrive far from the scrutiny of “School Frances.” Her friendship with Aled—built on secrecy, late-night collaboration, and total acceptance—forces her to confront how much of her life has been performative and how much is actually hers. After public failures and a brutal rejection from Cambridge, she lets go of a singular definition of success and chooses art, friendship, and a self that integrates both her discipline and her joy. Along the way she is buoyed by a warm, funny mum, an unexpected friendship with Daniel, and Raine’s no-nonsense loyalty, while the memory of Carys complicates and ultimately clarifies what it means to be honest.
Aled Last
Aled Last is the quiet classmate with a secret: he’s Radio Silence, the voice and mastermind of Universe City. Withdrawn at school and crushed by a controlling home life, he pours everything he cannot say into the podcast—an intricate story that becomes both lifeline and coded message to his estranged twin, Carys. Frances’s trust gives him a space to be known without being demanded to perform romance or perfection, even as the exposure of his identity and his mother’s escalating abuse push him into isolation and despair at university. With the help of Frances, Carys, Daniel, and Raine, he confronts the harm at home, ends the show on his own terms, and chooses a future that values well-being and creative autonomy over prestige. His journey reframes success, mental health, and the validity of platonic soulmatehood.
Carol Last
Carol Last is the novel’s antagonist and a chilling portrait of a parent who equates love with control. She manages her children’s lives like a project plan, punishing anything that distracts from academic achievement and maintaining a polished facade to outsiders while brutalizing the private sphere. Her tactics—destroying personal belongings, weaponizing guilt, and even disposing of the family dog—create the trauma that drives both Carys’s escape and Aled’s breakdown. In the end, when her children unite and refuse her scripts, she does not transform; she loses power. Carol stands as the story’s stark warning about abusive family dynamics and the costs of mistaking ambition for care.
Supporting Characters
Carys Last
Carys Last is Aled’s twin, the sharp, magnetic runaway who reinvented herself as “February” in London. Her absence haunts the story—she is both the intended listener of Universe City and the living proof that survival can mean leaving. When she reenters the narrative, she helps unravel the Last family’s history and becomes essential to rescuing Aled, modeling a freedom that refuses obligation to harmful relationships.
Daniel Jun
Daniel Jun begins as Head Boy and Frances’s polished academic rival, but the veneer hides a tender, complicated love for Aled and his own fear of disappointment. Miscommunication and silence corrode his bond with Aled, yet his loyalty never falters, and he eventually joins Frances to pull Aled back from the edge. By the end, Daniel has shed the role of adversary and emerged as a thoughtful friend who chooses honesty over image.
Raine Sengupta
Raine Sengupta is the perceptive classmate who notices what others miss: that “School Frances” is unhappy. Blunt, stylish, and fiercely dependable, she becomes one of Frances’s first genuinely safe friends from school, offering practical help and emotional ballast. Her resourcefulness is pivotal in finding Carys and coordinating the effort to reach Aled.
Frances's Mum
Frances’s Mum is the antidote to the novel’s coercive adults: warm, witty, and consistently in her daughter’s corner. She nudges Frances to prioritize passion over reputation and offers the kind of steady love that makes experimentation and risk feel possible. Her presence allows Frances to imagine a future chosen for joy, not just achievement.
Minor Characters
- Dr. Afolayan: The Academy’s head teacher, who prizes optics and results over student well-being; she demotes Frances after the “ghost school” fiasco, embodying institutional pressure.
- Maya: The de facto leader of Frances’s school friend group; friendly but surface-level, she interacts only with the curated “School Frances,” highlighting the limits of those connections.
- Miss García: Frances’s art teacher, who quietly validates her talent and plants the seed that art can be a life, not just a hobby.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the book’s center is the platonic bond between Frances and Aled, a rare depiction of soul-level friendship that resists romanticization. They build a private world through Universe City, enabling each to be fully known without fear or performance, and when crisis hits, it’s the sturdiness of this trust that catalyzes rescue and change.
Aled and Daniel’s relationship charts a different kind of intimacy—childhood friends navigating love, queer identity, and the damage caused by not saying hard things aloud. Where Frances and Aled model radical honesty, Aled and Daniel show the cost of silence; their eventual reconnection is less triumphant than tender, grounded in clearer communication.
Family dynamics drive the novel’s deepest conflicts. Carol’s authoritarian parenting fractures the Last siblings, sending Carys into self-preserving exile and pushing Aled toward collapse. Their reunion—supported by Frances—reverses the isolation Carol engineered, and together the twins sever her control. In contrast, Frances’s Mum offers a humane counterexample: boundaries without cruelty, guidance without coercion.
Among peers, the school sphere splits into superficial performance and genuine community. Maya and the wider friend group represent curated identities and transactional closeness, while Raine and, eventually, Daniel become part of Frances’s real support network. As these threads converge, the friends form an ad-hoc team—Frances’s creativity, Raine’s pragmatism, Daniel’s loyalty, and Carys’s hard-won independence—working in concert to reach Aled and end a cycle of harm. Institutions like the Academy (via Dr. Afolayan) loom as impersonal forces that reward appearances, but the characters ultimately reject those scripts in favor of self-defined futures.