Sometimes I Lie

Amber Reynolds wakes unable to move, speak or open her eyes, aware of the hospital room around her and of the people who visit. She does not know how she got there.

She tells the reader four things in the opening paragraph, the last of which is that she sometimes lies.

She can hear everything, move nothing, and she has told you outright that she lies.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The narrator announces in the first lines that she lies, which is a bolder choice than the category's usual gradual disclosure.

It changes the reader's task from detecting deception to identifying which statements are false, which is a more active and more interesting position. Feeney also repeats the statement at intervals, which keeps the reader from settling into any interpretation for longer than a few chapters.

The novel runs the present-day coma, the week preceding the accident, and a set of childhood diary entries from 1992.

The diary sections are the most effective, and their relationship to the other two threads is the book's central concealment. The diary sections are also dated, which supplies a fixed reference point against which the other two threads can be positioned by the reader.

The coma sections are conducted entirely through sound: conversations overheard, machinery, people who assume she cannot hear discussing her.

It is an effective device and the novel uses it well, particularly in scenes where visitors say things they would not if they thought she was listening.

Claire, Amber's sister, is the plot's centre, and the relationship between them is established as competitive, resentful and mutually dependent.

The sibling material is stronger than the marital material and carries the novel's actual argument. Feeney also withholds the nature of the grievance between them until late, and the disclosure is the book's most genuinely affecting moment.

Short chapters, rapid rotation between timelines, and a reveal or partial reveal in almost every section.

The book is designed for continuous reading and achieves it, though the density of disclosure becomes wearing in the final quarter. The chapter headings also name the timeline, which prevents confusion while still allowing Feeney to place them in a deliberately disorienting order.

There are several, and the final one has divided readers sharply: some find it a genuinely clever capstone and others find it one turn too many.

The objection has force. The last reversal requires reinterpreting material that had already been reinterpreted once. Feeney has written several subsequent novels using a similar late-reversal structure, and readers who dislike the device here will dislike those as well.

Feeney's construction is scrupulous about not stating falsehoods in the narration, relying instead on omission and on the reader's assumptions.

Rereading confirms this, and the book is better on a second pass than a first, which is unusual for the category. This is genuinely unusual in the category, where the more common technique is a narrator who states something false and is later revealed to have lied.

Present tense, first person, short sentences, with the childhood diary sections written in a deliberately different and simpler register.

The voice distinction is the novel's best piece of technique and is essential to the concealment. The present-day coma chapters are also written in a deliberately constrained vocabulary, reflecting a narrator with access to sound and to nothing else.

Outside Amber and Claire the cast is thin, and the husband in particular exists largely as a plot function.

The concentration on the sisters is deliberate and the surrounding thinness is the cost. The workplace scenes in particular exist to establish a single fact, and the colleagues have no function beyond delivering it.

The novel involves domestic violence, coercion and a sustained pattern of psychological abuse.

The treatment is not gratuitous and is central. Readers should expect the material rather than be surprised by it. The coercive dynamic in the marriage is also the element the novel handles with the most care, and it is better observed than the structural game around it.

Readers who enjoy being deliberately misled by a narrator who has told them in advance that she will.

It is one of the more structurally ambitious books in this group and among the most divisive. Readers who dislike late reversals should be warned that the last one is the whole point.