The White Lie

Absolutely searing... we have a major new talent in our midst.

Gillies' beautifully crafted debut combines page-turning aplomb with psychological insight... She is a tantalising storyteller, dropping in clues, vertiginous surprises and unexpected revelations.

One hot summer day, Michael Salter, 19-year-old scion of a posh Highland family, disappears. When his childlike aunt claims she drowned him during a fight, the family close ranks. No police. No memorial service. No titbits for village gossips. A decade of deceit begins. Narrated by Michael from beyond the grave, Andrea Gillies' debut novel unpicks the mesh of lies, some white, some not, that entangle the Salters, bringing the closed world of the big house to life with cinematic clarity. A gripping exploration of the stories families tell about themselves, myths sometimes more potent than the truth."

Fizzing with energy, suspense and tense dialogue, this is an elegantly brilliant novel.

There's an echo of Virginia Woolf that lifts Gillies' work above the average family drama... This is an unusual, unsettling, often lovely story that plumbs the depths of what family means.

The White Lie is a story of decline, of a crumbling hierarchy taking desperate measures to save face before the hordes sweep them away. This is a page-turner. It is also, finally, very moving.

Gillies 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.

A really terrific read... Elegant, well written, genuinely gripping.

A wonderfully compelling portrait of a family haunted by secrets and lies... pitch perfect on the chilling, devastating consequences of guilt.'

A fond meditation on the calming virtues of donkeyhood and daydreaming... a wistful travelogue

Gillies writes magnificently on everything she touches.