Amber Reynolds wakes in a hospital bed unable to move, speak, or open her eyes — but fully able to hear the doctors, her husband, and her sister as they come and go. She knows three things for certain: her name is Amber, she is in a coma, and her husband doesn't love her anymore. What she can't remember is how she ended up here.
The novel unfolds across three interlocking strands: Amber's paralysed present in the hospital; the week leading up to the accident that put her there, when her marriage and her job as a radio presenter were both quietly falling apart; and a set of childhood diary entries from twenty years earlier that hint at a darker history between two sisters. As the timelines converge, it becomes increasingly unclear which of Amber's certainties can be trusted.
Alice Feeney's debut is a tightly coiled psychological thriller built on an unreliable narrator and a slow drip of withheld information. Sometimes I Lie plays its readers as deftly as its characters play one another, driving toward a twist that recasts the whole story — and inviting a second read to catch everything that was hiding in plain sight.