A People 10 Best Books of the Year - A New York Times Notable Book
of the Year - An Independent (UK) 20 Best Books of the Year
"Wise, bracingly honest...A reassuring reality check...Exhilarating."
--New York Times Book Review
A heartbreaking, soul-baring novel about the repercussions of choice
that "will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere," (starred
Kirkus) from the award-winning author of The Welsh Girl and The
Fortunes
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself traces the complex consequences
of one of the most personal yet public, intimate yet political
experiences a family can have: to have a child, and conversely, the
decision not to have a child. A first pregnancy is interrupted by test
results at once catastrophic and uncertain. A second pregnancy ends in a
fraught birth, a beloved child, the purgatory of further tests--and
questions that reverberate down the years.
When does sorrow turn to shame?
When does love become labor?
When does chance become choice?
When does a diagnosis become destiny?
And when does fact become fiction?
This spare, graceful narrative chronicles the flux of parenthood,
marriage, and the day-to-day practice of loving someone. As challenging
as it is vulnerable, as furious as it is tender, as touching as it is
darkly comic, Peter Ho Davies's new novel is an unprecedented depiction
of fatherhood.
"There are some stories that require as much courage to write as they
do art. Peter Ho Davies's achingly honest, searingly comic portrait of
fatherhood is just such a story...The world needs more stories like
this one, more of this kind of courage, more of this kind of love."
--Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend
"There is nothing superfluous in these pages...A novel that...earns its
place on the shelf alongside the frank and sometimes acerbic memoirs of
Rachel Cusk and Anne Enright." --Claire Messud, Harper's
