We Were Liars

Title: We Were Liars

Author: E. Lockhart

Publisher: Hot Key Books

Published: May 2014

Click to buy.

I can’t lie. This is a stunning book and I tore through it quickly. Pain seeps from the pages. We Were Liars chronicles an adolescent girl’s breakdown and selective amnesia surrounding a traumatic accident (which we think could be about one thing, and then again, it might not be that at all).

Cadence Sinclair Eastman lives a decadent life among her elite, privileged Massachusetts relatives (the illustrious Sinclair family) on their privately owned Beechwood Island. We even get an island map and family tree in the opening pages. But we know at once the supposed idyll masks lies: ‘Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family,’ Cadence writes, ‘no one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.’ Her beloved friends are cousins Mirren and Johnny (part of the Sinclair clan) and Gat (not a part). Cadence falls for Gat, but (inevitably, we think), at the end of the summer, Gat leaves and Cadence is found injured on her family’s island beach, with no memory of how she got there. Over the following two years, Cadence retreats into herself, succumbing to intense migraines and depressive behaviour, still unable to recount events from that earlier summer. Mirren and Johnny fail to respond to her emails and when she finally sees them again with Gat, it becomes plain that, if they do know anything, they are not telling what happened. The story is Cadence’s apparent attempt to piece together the puzzle … or is it actually something else altogether?

Lockhart writes in clipped, emotive prose that tears at you, and I don’t think I have read a YA book in which the brokenness following a failed relationship is better conveyed (not in a way that makes you gag, either), or how excessive, consuming grief and guilt can distort and cripple your thinking. The twist of the story is what I did not see coming; I placed the book down and just sat feeling numb when I had finished. There is a deep mystery that Cadence skates around, and the revelation of it isn’t melodramatic or overdone, just horrifying realisation. We Were Liars is a heartrending experience for a protagonist whose naïveté and desire to rebel backfires drastically, and a haunting book that will linger with you after you place it back on the shelf.

(Hot Key did an incredible #LiarsLiveRead of this book and collected reader responses here on their blog.)