Everything is Lies

Everything is Lies

Blurb

Sophia is on a work night out when she receives a call from her anxious mother, this is a regular occurrence and a frustrated Sophia quickly gets rid of her saying she will talk to her tomorrow.

The following day her mother is found hung and her father badly wounded in an apparent murder-suicide gone wrong. Sophia can't believe her mother would do something like this.

She is even less convinced when she realises her mother was about to publish a manuscript, one that will reveal a lot of deeply hidden secrets, secrets that some people may kill to keep hidden.


Our Review

Everything is Lies by Helen Callaghan

Sophia is on a work night out when she receives one of regular calls from her anxious mother. She wants to get back to the guy she has been flirting with all night.

“I tired not to sigh, to be patient. I worried about my fragile, gossamer mother a lot, and lived in terror whenever she called that this would be the one night she genuinely needed me.”

She feels as though there is something wrong with her mum but decides she will just head to her parent’s house the next day.

Later she feels guilty for hanging up on her mum especially when the guy she was flirting with turns out to be married.

The following day Sophia heads for the garden centre run by her parents and finds it closed so she heads over to the ramshackle house they own instead but finds it empty. She begins to be concerned when she looks out the window and sees something that shouldn’t be there.

“My mum hung suspended from the branches of the big sweet chestnut, the stepladder sprawled on its side, discarded.”

Shortly after discovering her mum she realises her dad is lying wounded behind another one of the trees. The police believe it is an apparent murder-suicide gone wrong. Sophia can't believe her mother would do something like this.

“My father was very badly hurt they said. He’d been stabbed twice, once in the lungs and once in the stomach, and his last wound had ruptured his bowel. Sepsis had followed.”

Sophia is convinced there was someone else involved in her mother’s death especially when she learns her parents had been burgled four times in the last six months. Her conviction strengthens when she realises her mother was about to publish a memoir, one that will reveal a lot of deeply hidden secrets, secrets that some people may kill to keep hidden.

The publisher tells her that he hadn’t seen the finished work, but he had read some notebooks and liked what he saw. He warns her that some of the material contained in the memoir is of a sensitive nature and may be a bit too explicit for her.

When Sophia finds the notebooks, she is horrified to learn her mother had once been in a cult.

“I recognized my name on the very first line…’for my Sophia’ – and her handwriting made my heart clench with love and loss.

‘Everything is lies,’ she’d written, ‘and nobody is what they seem.’

Her mother Nina was a naïve freshman when she first arrived at Cambridge in the late 80’s. At a party with friends she is introduced to Aaron Kessler. Aaron was once the singer in The Boarhounds, a famous rock band.

Nina can’t help but being fascinated by him and against the advice of her friends she joins him at a house party and then for a weekend. She likes the attention he lavishes on her, he makes her feels special and before the weekend has turned into longer and she has no thought of returning to university.

“Don’t misunderstand me I wasn’t stupid enough to think this was true love, or at least I didn’t then. I grew stupider over time.”

Aaron is the leader of a cult called The Order of The Ascendants, a mind control cult. He sucks Nina in by lavishing her in affection and then once she is hooked becoming increasingly distant, so she feels she needs to do more and more to earn his affection.

Sophia and the reader both realise that something is not right in the situation and that she is being a naïve fool, but it takes much longer for Nina to admit it to herself.

In some ways I found this book similar to Emma Cline’s The Girls and fans of that book should read this.

One thing I loved about Everything is Lies was the twist at the end and the sense of suspense throughout.

Our Final Rating...

Our Rating

  • Currently 3.5/5

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