The Little Liar

LoveReading Says

Early on in The Little Liar, Mitch Albom’s omniscient narrator’s voice (actually, the voice of Truth) lays the foundations for — and directs readers’ perspective on — a story about how lies grow, and how love redeems us. It’s the story of Nico. A boy who hadn’t told a lie until he was eleven years old. A boy whose story “concerns deception, great deception, but also great truth, and heartbreak and war and family and revenge and love, the kind of love that is tested over and over. Before the story ends, there is even a moment of magic, set against an endless tapestry of human frailty.”

Into this starkly delivered set-up and framework, we read how young Nico was offered a chance to save his own family when the Nazis invaded his Greek hometown. He obliges, and tells his fellow Jewish neighbours to jump aboard east-bound trains, where jobs supposedly await. He assures them they’ll be safe, only to realise, far too late, that his loved ones will never, ever return. As the decades pass, Nico realises the awful truth of what his actions and lies were responsible for.

Joanne Owen

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