Review: The Lie

The Lie by Helen Dunmore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What would you do if you blamed yourself for your friends death?
But what more, is it if it happened in France, in the middle of no-man's land, during world war one?

This is how Dan feels, haunted by his friend, Dan tries to return home a few years after the war has finished. Like anyone who has gone through the horrors of the war, they just want to life quietly and get on with his life.

But after the death of the old woman that he had lived with, Dan finds himself lying to people of her condition, what seems like an innocent action of burying her on her own land, like she wanted, leads to an action which will see Dan reunited with his friend Fredrick.

Set in a quiet Cornish, coastal town during 1920, Helen Dunmore once again weeves a tails of war mixing with present life and the horrors that it brought.
She leads us through a battle of Dan's mind when it comes to visiting Fredrick's sister. We are shown moments from Dan's childhood and moments from when he is deployed for the trenches in France and in the middle of battle.

Along with a heartbreaking novel from the very first page, Dunmore starts each chapter with a insight taken from real books and magazines that soldiers would've read back in ww1. It helps to set the whole novel in to it's setting, and even as jumpy it may seem to some people when we jump from Dan's present to his past, to me, it flows perfectly.

As only the second book of Helen Dunmore's that I have read, the first being, The Greatcoat. A ghost story set in ww2 and the present.
The Lie is a book that will jerk at your heartstrings and have you leaving your heart with Dan at the end.

It's a book that I know I will read again and again. If I could give this book more than 5 stars, I would give it ten and plenty of praise to Helen Dunmore.

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