The White Lie

A stunning debut novel from the winner of the Orwell Prize 2010 and the inaugural Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2009

On a hot summer’s afternoon, Ursula Salter runs sobbing from the loch on her parents’ Scottish estate and confesses, distraught, that she has killed Michael, her 19 year old nephew.

But what really happened? No body can be found, and Ursula’s story is full of contradictions. In order to protect her, the Salters come up with another version of events, a decision that some of them will come to regret.

Years later, at a family gathering, a witness speaks up and the web of deceit begins to unravel.  What is the white lie? Only one person knows the whole truth. Narrating from beyond the grave, Michael takes us to key moments in the past, looping back and back until – finally – we see what he sees.

 

“Absolutely searing… we have a major new talent in our midst”
Daily Express

“A white lie is, by convention, a harmless thing… Gillies explores in this novel how such lies may be very far from innocent in intention or in effect… the truth beginning to work its way to the surface, like a swollen and decomposing corpse… She excels in her portrait of a landscape that consumes the merely human – eats it for lunch, as it were – and has slowly, over many generations, created a family in its own image.”
Helen Dunmore, Times

“The White Lie is a story of decline, of a crumbling ­hierarchy taking desperate measures to save face (and the bloodline and the silver) before the hordes sweep them away. Yet, more than that, it is an account of the unreliability of personal history. Is a family story true because it is repeated? Does it matter in the end if the “truth” is revealed, if the lie has been lived? This novel develops ideas of the fragility and fluidity of identity. We all self-mythologise.
“The strength of this immersive story is that it does not require neat revelations. The White Lie is, even with its detours, a page-turner. It is also, finally, very moving…”
Francine Stock, Guardian

“There’s an echo of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, that lifts Gillies’ work above the average family drama. The fact that she also keeps a tight hold of the gossipy strands of her story is a great credit to her powers, as well as her ability to keep her readers guessing the truth to the end. This is an unusual, unsettling, often lovely story that plumbs the depths of what family means. It is a fine debut novel.”
Lesley McDowell, The Scotsman

“Gillies writes with elegance… bringing the closed world of the big house to life with cinematic clarity, the guilt-ridden residents as distressed as the threadbare furniture. The book has a pleasantly teasing quality, stealthily circling its central mysteries, challenging the reader to keep up while it flits between eras. A gripping exploration of the stories families tell about themselves, myths sometimes more potent than the truth.”
Financial Times

“**** Gillies handles her large cast and clashing versions of events with a precision that makes reading this imaginative novel a fascinating process of discovery.”
Metro

“Gillies’ beautifully crafted debut combines page-turning aplomb with psychological insight… She is a tantalising storyteller, dropping in clues, vertiginous surprises and unexpected revelations.”
Marie Claire

“An intricate, well-observed novel of secrets and guilt.”
Woman & Home

“Gillies writes magnificently on everything she touches, be it family secrets, Highland light, or the nature of memory.”
Sunday Times

“By the time I was half way through the book I was returning to it at every spare moment to find out what happened – and it really wasn’t what I was expecting…” Bookbag

“A really terrific read… Elegant, well written, genuinely gripping ”
Joanna Harris

“A wonderfully compelling portrait of a family haunted by secrets and lies… pitch perfect on the chilling, devastating consequences of guilt”
Sally Brampton

“Gillies excels in her portrait of a landscape that consumes the merely human, and slowly over many generations has created a family in its own image.”
Helen Dunmore - The Times

About Andrea Gillies

Andrea Gillies has had a diverse career, encompassing writing, publicity work, travel and reference book editing, and writing a drinks column for Scotland on Sunday newspaper.