The Good Liar

Now a major motion picture starring Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen. “A superb thriller and a truly engrossing read.”—Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author of In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 When Roy meets a wealthy widow online, he can hardly believe his luck. Just like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, Roy is a man who lives to deceive—and everything about Betty suggests she’s an easy mark. He’s confident that his scheme to swindle her will be a success. After all, he’s done this before. As this remarkable feat of storytelling weaves together Roy’s and Betty’s futures, it also unwinds the past. Dancing across more than half a century—decades that encompass unthinkable cruelty, extraordinary resilience, and remarkable kindness—it takes us right back to the beginning of their very different lives, following the twists and turns through childhood, an adolescence and young adulthood indelibly marked by war, and an adult existence carved out amid a world still reeling from its aftermath. As Roy’s sins stack up against the burdens Betty carries, it becomes a story of salvation, and survival—and for Roy and Betty, there is a reckoning to be made when the endgame of Roy’s crooked plot plays out. Some things can never be forgotten. Or forgiven.

Now an old man living in the United States, Marcel recalls his childhood in German-occupied France, especially the summer that he and his older brother Rene befriended a young German soldier. By the author of Five Alien Elves.

The instant New York Times bestseller from the author of the Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me: a story about spies, games, and friendship. The first day Georges (the S is silent) moves into a new Brooklyn apartment, he sees a sign taped to a door in the basement: SPY CLUB MEETING—TODAY! That’s how he meets his twelve-year-old neigh­bor Safer. He and Georges quickly become allies—and fellow spies. Their assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer’s requests become more and more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: how far is too far to go for your only friend? “Will touch the hearts of kids and adults alike.” —NPR Winner of the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more!

“Jones’s sensational debut has the bones of a thriller but reads like literary fiction: lean, shrewd, and gratifyingly real.”—Entertainment Weekly When a woman conceals her sister’s death to claim their joint inheritance, her deception exposes a web of dangerous secrets in this addictive new thriller for fans of Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, and Paula Hawkins. An ID Book Club Selection Leslie Flores has the perfect life—a loving husband, a happy newborn, and a New Mexico home straight out of a magazine. She’s been the perfect daughter, too, taking care of her ailing father in his final days. But Leslie has a dark secret—and it’s an expensive secret to keep. When she discovers she won’t receive a penny of her inheritance unless she finds her estranged sister, Robin, she sets out to track her down. Instead, upon arriving at Robin’s apartment, Leslie discovers her body. Just as Leslie begins to panic, she meets a charismatic aspiring actress named Mary who bears a striking resemblance to Robin—and has every reason to leave her past behind. The two women make a bargain: Mary will impersonate Robin for a week in exchange for Robin’s half of the cash. Neither realizes how high the stakes will become when Mary takes a dead woman’s name. Even as Mary begins to suspect Leslie is hiding something, and Leslie realizes the stranger living in her house has secrets of her own, Robin’s wild, troubled legacy threatens to eclipse them both. Fans of Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, and Paula Hawkins will relish this darkly addictive portrait of the ties that bind and the secrets we all keep from one another.

She's faking her way into the most exclusive social circles for revenge. But how long can her lies hold up? Seventeen-year-old Lydia Cornwallis has arrived on an exclusive Caribbean island populated only by the ultra-rich and their staff. The Harrington sisters rule the island, throwing lavish parties and treating everyone around them like toys for their amusement, and Lydia simply can't wait to meet them. Because she's not Lydia Cornwallis. And the Harringtons have hell to pay for what they've done. When a storm hits the island and all routes to the mainland are cut off, Lydia is given the perfect opportunity to exact her murderous revenge. With time running out and her identity about to be exposed, Lydia will need to draw on epic nerve, quicksilver adaptability, and sly cunning to carry out her deadly plans.

An “outrageously hilarious” novel about a young man who has trouble with the truth (The Boston Globe). Adrian Healey loves to lie. He does it all the time. Every minute, every moment. And worse, he does it wonderfully, imaginatively, brilliantly. He lies to buck the system, to express his contempt for convention, but mostly because he just plain likes to. It’s fun. He invents a lost pornographic novel by Charles Dickens, and, for himself, a career as a Piccadilly rent boy, hireable by the hour. But Adrian’s lies eventually bring true danger, as he finds himself caught up in the machinations of a shadowy network that puts his own life at risk, in this “clever and entertaining novel that will appeal to Anglophiles with a twisted sense of humor” (Library Journal).

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

The understanding of early deception is important for both theoretical and practical purposes. Children's deceptive behaviors provide a window into their models and theories of mind. On a practical level, childhood deception poses challenges for the legal system as well as parents and schools. In this volume, contributors from diverse areas of psychology -- social, cognitive, and developmental -- as well as philosophy and law examine the determinants of deception among preschoolers. In addition to a wealth of new empirical findings dealing with gender, motivation, and context in children's use of deception, evidence is provided for recursivity of awareness in children as young as three years of age. With chapters and commentaries written by leading scholars in the United States, England, and Australia, this book reflects a growing concern with ecological validity in developmental studies and may prompt rethinking of traditional models of mind based exclusively on data from laboratory experiments.