Sometimes I Lie

Sometimes I Lie is a psychological thriller by the English writer Alice Feeney, published in 2017 and her first novel.

Amber Reynolds is in a hospital bed in a coma, conscious but unable to move or speak, listening to the people who come and go around her without being able to answer them. She does not remember the accident that put her there, and the suspicion she cannot voice is about her husband, who visits. The novel is told in three strands at once: the paralysed present, the week before the accident, and a set of diaries written twenty years earlier by a child, and the reader is left to work out how they belong together and which of the narrators is telling the truth. The three strands are arranged so that what the reader understands about the marriage changes with each one, and the diaries are the strand that carries the most weight, since the child writing them knows more than she can explain. Feeney was a television producer before she wrote fiction, and the book was her first.