• The Book of Lies will include a P.S. section featuring insights, interviews, and more.

Life on the tiny island of Guernsey in the English Channel can be tough for some, but things have become particularly claustrophobic for Cat Rozier. She’s fifteen, an overweight bookworm, and she’s just killed her best friend.

Nicolette is the new girl at Cat’s all-girls high school, beautiful and instantly popular. But Nic, without explanation, takes Cat under her wing, inviting her out to parties and teaching her to drink whatever they can shoplift. The two become inseparable, while the other girls wonder why Nic’s hanging out with this geek. A perceived betrayal, however, sends them spinning apart, and in the way that small-town bullies do best, Nic’s retribution is larger than life.

Cat’s father, Emile, has died just months before. While running the small press he’d inherited from his father, Emile made it his life’s work to bring to light the truth about the Nazi occupation of Guernsey, from Churchill’s abandonment of the island to those families and individuals who tried to resist in their own way. But above all, he hoped to set straight the reputation of his older brother, Charlie. Through audio recordings Charlie left behind before his death in 1965 and letters Emile wrote to various publications, we piece together Charlie’s own confession, his struggle against the Nazis, and the betrayals buried deep in the island and in the Rozier family story.

Captivating and moving, The Book of Lies takes us on a journey with two unreliable narrators whose unique voices are not easily forgotten. Horlock expertly captures the indignation and attitude of a teenaged girl and the defiance and anger of a scorned man in a brilliant debut about the conflicts and trials of growing up, and the repressed histories that we all harbor.