The Liar

Praise

“Sometimes [Johannes Lye’s] jottings have a sour, dyspeptic flavour; often they are lyrical, wry, and downright sarcastic. Consequently, you cannot help but stick with Lye, with his strange magnetic voice…Larkin provides a fine translation so that the narrative never fades or stalls.” —NJ McGarrigle, The Irish Times

“[The Liar] is a book that will lead readers to marvel at how intricate storytelling and human life can be, and how subtly their intricacies can be linked.” —Poul Houe, Rain Taxi Review

“Paul Larkin beautifully renders Johannes’s epiphanic final diary entries: ‘On any map [Sandø] is tiny, but for any inhabitant her mass is huge … The island has immeasurable chapters of time in her. Vanished times and times that are yet to come.'” —Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement

“A great work of art. . . . There is a palpable unease in every sentence.” —Tom Kristensen
 
“There is a sense of measured urgency in [The Liar], which carries you along as you read, and makes you unwilling to put the book down before you have finished, before you have learned whether Johannes sees his first woodcock of the season and achieves his love’s desire, and which of her two loves Annemari finally chooses—before you learn, in fact, the final direction of all these vivid lives which inform and make absorbing each page of the book.” —The Sydney Morning Herald