We Were Liars

The Sinclairs are a beautiful, privileged New England family who summer on their own private island off Cape Cod. Every year the extended clan gathers on Beechwood, presided over by a wealthy, image-obsessed patriarch, and every year Cadence Sinclair Eastman falls back in with the Liars, the tight group made up of her cousins Johnny and Mirren and their friend Gat, the boy she loves. Their summers are golden, until they aren't.

During the summer she is fifteen, something happens to Cadence, an accident she cannot remember, leaving her with debilitating migraines and gaping holes in her memory. Two years later she returns to the island determined to piece together what really occurred, even as her family closes ranks around a truth no one will name. As she reconstructs that lost summer, the polished surface of Sinclair perfection begins to crack.

E. Lockhart's We Were Liars is a spare, lyrical young-adult suspense novel about wealth, privilege, first love, and the stories families tell to protect themselves. Built on an unreliable narrator and a closely guarded secret, it became a word-of-mouth phenomenon known for an ending readers rarely see coming.