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The Liar
The Liar
Dec 29, 2025 6:32 PM

Author:Stephen Fry

The Liar

Adrian Healey is magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life; unprepared too for the afternoon in Salzburg when he will witness the savage murder of a Hungarian violinist; unprepared to learn about the Mendax device; unprepared for more murders and wholly unprepared for the truth.

Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel, by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic.

'Hilarious' Literary Review

'Sublime' Cosmopolitan

Reviews

A quite brilliant first novel

—— Sunday Times

The Liar is hilarious - page after page of the most outrageous and often filthy jokes, delicious conceits, instant, brilliant ripostes that would only occur to ordinary mortals after days of teeth-grinding lunacy

—— Literary Review

Brilliantly entertaining and consistently outrageous

—— Daily Mail

Sublime

—— Cosmopolitan

Levy is experimenting with language in subversive ways

—— Literary Review

This is a work about what it means to be a writer: its reinventions, isolations, self-interrogations, its shifting penury and riches, both emotional and financial. . . [Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing.

—— Financial Times

Lyrical sentences come naturally, full of cadence . . . She's particularly touching on the love between mothers and daughters, and funny too . . . Real Estate is a book to dive into. Come on in, the water's lovely.

—— Daily Telegraph

Her voice - at once jokey and elliptical - is so casually intimate that it feels like catching up with an old friend . . . In three moving memoirs, Levy has perfectly fused the act of writing with the art of living.

—— i

Levy's intellectual energy is as frenetic as [the] dance floor, her memoirs a string of disparate pearls that entwine travelogue with philosophy and memory with literature

—— i

Expect fierce prose and bold meditations on what it means to be a woman.

—— Red

Ingenious

—— Time Out
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