I really had high hopes for this novel. The cover is beautiful (and I'm always a big believer in judging a book by its cover), the plot sounded really intriguing and the praise for it seemed good, but when it came down to it I really struggled to enjoy this at all.
Liar is largely about a teen girl called Nofar who, desperate for attention as a lonely teenage girl, lets people believe that a washed up celeb sexually assaulted her. She knows he's innocent, but when people see her crying in an alleyway because he's been rude to her, she does not correct their assumptions. From here the lie spirals - the man's life is being ruined, but can she bite the bullet and admit that she wasn't entirely honest, risking losing all the new-found respect she's received?
Later in the book we meet Raymonde, an elderly lady who similarly tells a small lie and watches it snowball: she is mistaken for a deceased friend, and winds up giving tours of concentration camps, despite not being a survivor of one unlike her friend. Will either of the pair battle out their consciences?
As I said, I really loved the premise for this, and thought the book could be a really interesting one about how a small lie can really grow, fold in other lies and become insurmountable. However, I really struggled to suspend my belief whilst reading this. I just don't think that, unfortunately, in our world a man would be jailed and have his life turned upside down based solely on the word of a teenage girl with absolutely no evidence for the sexual assault or attempted assault. The police imply that Nofar has been a victim of attempted assault and she just agrees, rather than really telling them what happened, and then there's not any proper investigation after that.
I found both Nofar and Raymonde really difficult characters to get on board with, but it's no flaw for a character to be unlikeable. I just find it hard to enjoy books where I can't get on board with the main characters at all. In Nofar's case the guy was really nasty, but didn't deserve his entire life ruining, but with Raymonde there was no 'bad guy' on the other end of the lie, unless you count the people attending the talk who couldn't recognise this woman was not really a holocaust survivor.
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