Liars

A Novel

By: Sarah Manguso

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all—from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.

©2024 Sarah Manguso (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso’s crystalline prose. . . . A furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition.”—NPR

“[A] painful and beautifully wrought story of a relationship . . . Manguso is a poet-novelist who knows brevity can whittle the sharpest knife.”—Vulture

“A slow-motion portrait of a collapsing marriage . . . a bracing story of a woman on the verge.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review