A Book of Untruths

A true writer’s voice.

A curious memoir… Doyle has had the clever idea of structuring her story through a series of 70 of the lies told in her childhood and early adulthood. In the process, she explores the nature of lying and asks why lies should beget lies within marriages and families. Although this is her first book, Doyle is a natural and spirited writer, and her story is confidently and stylishly told… [an] elegantly ambivalent book.

A refreshingly original debut.

[A] powerful, distinctive memoir... related in a series of short passages of numbered lies – building to form a kind of literary mosaic of a life story. While Doyle sometimes muses conceptually on the essence of truth, lies and memory, it soon becomes clear that her story is quite enough on its own … the darkest truths are teased out, and examined – with Doyle challenging the reader to stick with her tense, candid, sage testimony to the last unsettling, rewarding word.

[A] dazzling memoir... [an] extraordinary evocation of the fragility of family, of sanity, of children, of us all.

Doyle faces up to some of the ghosts in her family’s past and a difficult childhood in a witty and engaging memoir. [She] tells the story of her life through a series of lies, while exploring the wider human nature to fib… Each short chapter looks at the lies told either to, or by Doyle, and those around her and builds up a picture of her life through the themes of love, marriage and family.