Sometimes I Lie
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
ALICE FEENEYS NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Boldly plotted, tightly knotted—a provocative true-or-false thriller that deepens and darkens to its ink-black finale. Marvelous.” —AJ Finn, author of The Woman in the Window
My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:
1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.
Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Almost nothing is as it initially appears in BBC News veteran Feeney's bold if overambitious debut, a serpentine tale of betrayal, madness, and murder. Amber Reynolds, a radio show presenter, is lying in a London-area hospital in a coma the day after Christmas, body unresponsive but mind alert, struggling to piece together what happened to her and whether it has anything to do with Paul, her husband (whom the police suspect), or Claire, the younger sister she fears Paul's fallen for. Not to mention the menacing man who sneaks into her hospital room. But as days pass and memories flood back both from the turbulent previous weeks, when she was fighting to keep her job and near-frantic about Paul being unfaithful, and from the particularly fraught year when she was 11 it becomes clear that this is an infinitely more sinister story. Feeney packs the final 60-odd pages with a series of head-spinning and, in some cases, head-scratching plot twists; the overall effect is to leave readers wondering exactly what happened and how much of Amber's account they can believe. Feeney is definitely a writer to watch.
Customer Reviews
Good
Good book, confusing plot at times. I did not like the way it ended.
Meh - just ok.
3.5 stars - this was a difficult one for me to rate because genuinely I liked the concept of this book. What sets this novel apart is that you never really find out the truth and it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. However, I often found myself confused and unsure if I was following the story correctly and went down a Reddit rabbit hole just to try and find out what was going on. Turns out no one really knows. Overall, I did find the writing intriguing and did look forward to picking the book up to figure out what was going to happen next. Although sometimes it seemed a bit too overdramatic. In the end I landed in the middle. Not the best, but not the worst.
She never misses
I enjoyed this, although I’ll say I kinda liked the work storyline more than the others! Alice Feeney never misses, but I’m not surprised this was her debut. I think she’s definitely gotten better since then. I wasn’t terribly shocked by the ending, but very enjoyable nonetheless.