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Carola Lovering
Carola Lovering is the author of the popular thriller Tell Me Lies. If you enjoyed that twisty read, you'll want to check out her other work.
Tell Me Lies
Synopsis
Lucy Albright arrives at a small California college glad to be far from home — and from her mother, whom she cannot forgive for something that happened years earlier. Ready to remake herself, she instead meets Stephen DeMarco, a magnetic, calculating fellow student who seems to see her more clearly than anyone ever has.
What follows is the slow, addictive unraveling of a toxic relationship. Told in alternating chapters from both Lucy's and Stephen's points of view, the novel traces their on-again, off-again entanglement from campus parties to post-college life in New York, exposing the gap between how Lucy experiences their love and how Stephen actually operates. Along the way it looks hard at the private compromises — with food, with self-worth, with the truth — that a person will make to keep someone who is bad for them.
Carola Lovering's Tell Me Lies is a sharp, propulsive debut about desire, self-deception, and the long shadow of a first love that was never really love at all.
Genres
Characters
Lucy AlbrightProtagonist
A Long Island native starting college in California, remaking herself far from home, who falls into an all-consuming relationship with Stephen.
Stephen DeMarcoAntagonist
A charismatic, self-serving upperclassman and aspiring lawyer who narrates his own chapters and treats the people around him as means to an end.
Diana BunnSupporting
Stephen's on-again, off-again girlfriend, caught in his orbit alongside Lucy.
JackieSupporting
Lucy's college roommate and loyal friend, a steadying voice of reason against Lucy's self-destructive choices.
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