What Lies Between Us

Maggie and Nina, a mother and daughter, have shared the same house for as long as either can remember. Every other night they eat dinner together, and afterwards Nina helps Maggie back up to the attic room where a heavy chain keeps her in place. To Nina, this is justice: Maggie did something years ago that she believes can never be forgiven, and now her mother is paying for it.

But the arrangement is not as simple as one woman's punishment of another. There are things about the past that Nina does not know, and things Maggie will do almost anything to keep hidden — even as the two of them remain locked together in a house built on decades of resentment and lies. As the narrative alternates between their two accounts, each woman's version of events undercuts the other's, and the reader is left to work out where the real cruelty lies.

John Marrs turns a claustrophobic domestic set-up into a tightly plotted psychological thriller about captivity, guilt, and the stories families tell to survive one another. What Lies Between Us builds through a series of reversals toward a conclusion that reframes who has been wronged, and who has been lying all along.