Tell Me Lies

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.