What To Read

The consensus on Sarah Manguso's forthcoming novel Liars from early reviewers: once you crack it open, you should cancel your plans to read it in one sitting - and carve out some time to recover afterwards. Devastating, biting, painful and deeply funny are the descriptors that keep popping up in reactions to this raw depiction of marriage.

We've selected Liars as one of five notable books coming out next season that will be featured in our First Dibs Editors Salon, taking place virtually on May 1 at 7pm ET. Learn more and RSVP.

We are honored to have the book's acquiring editor, Parisa Ebrahimi (Executive Editor of Hogarth), join us at the salon. She shared this personal note about the book as a special preview just for Tertulia readers.

Liars by Sarah Manguso (July 23)

Sarah Manguso’s searing new novel, LIARS—the story of a marriage and its dissolution— is the novel I most want to press into the hands of all my friends, regardless of their relationship status. It’s a novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist – and how marriage makes liars out of us all. In Sarah’s words, it’s all fiction, except the parts that are true. Written with economy andinsight, it is a tour de force of wit and fire — feminist, angry as all hell, and the wisest thing I’ve read in years. “I remember how desperately I had to cling to the story of my happy marriage. It took effort,” Jane says after her husband betrays her. “It felt so good to stop lying.” It’s a message that seems to be resonating with so many readers. One bookseller told me that he had to take a good, long look in the mirror after he had read it. Many others have commented how this novel seems to be written out of their own lives. In Rachel Yoder’s words, “this book will connect with so many women”, and we are already seeing the novel inspire passion in all who read it (usually in one feverish sitting).

Sarah Manguso’s remarkable career has spanned nine books and encompassed nearly every genre before she turned her hand to fiction. She has been hailed as “one of the most original and exciting writers in English today” by Jhumpa Lahiri and “one of the greats” by Andrew Sean Greer. LIARS is her most revelatory work yet, fusing the raw emotional intensity of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment with the same smart, pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, to form an unputdownable and thought-provoking atom bomb of a novel. So: hold on to your hat, you are in the nose cone of the rocket with this one. This is going to be the most coruscating, blistering, brilliant, book you’ll read all summer.

– Parisa Ebrahimi, Executive Editor, Hogarth