Summary: We Were Liars

The GIST

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart is a short, sharp young adult novel that sits somewhere between a family drama and a psychological thriller. Its narrator, Cadence Sinclair Eastman, belongs to a family that looks like an advertisement for old New England money: handsome, blond, athletic, and gathered every summer on an island they own outright. When she was fifteen something happened there that left her with crushing migraines and a hole in her memory. Two years later she goes back to find out what it was. Nobody will tell her. She has to remember it herself.

Published in 2014, the book was named a best book of the year by NPR, Time, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe, and it has never really gone away. Readers keep pressing it on one another, usually with the instruction to say nothing about how it ends. Its prequel, Family of Liars, goes back to the youth of Cadence's aunts, and in 2025 the story became an Amazon Prime Video series. Under the mystery is something more lasting: a clear-eyed look at what money does to the people who depend on it, and at the stories a mind will tell itself to avoid a truth it cannot bear.

The Story

The Sinclairs are, by their own account, a family in which no one is a criminal, an addict or a failure. The fortune was made by the patriarch, Harris Sinclair, and everyone else lives off it. Harris owns Beechwood Island, a small private island off Martha's Vineyard, and on it he has built four houses: one for himself and his wife, Tipper, and one for each of their three daughters. The daughters are Penny, who is Cadence's mother, Carrie and Bess. Each summer the whole clan assembles there, the aunts and the cousins and the dogs, and the outside world is kept on the far side of the water.

Cadence is the eldest grandchild. Two cousins are close to her in age: Johnny, who is Carrie's son, and Mirren, who is Bess's daughter. The fourth member of their circle is not a Sinclair at all. Carrie's partner, Ed, has a nephew named Gat Patil, who is Johnny's best friend and has been coming to the island summer after summer. Gat is of Indian heritage, he is not rich, and he sees the family from an angle none of the others can. These four roam Beechwood as a unit, apart from the grown-ups and the little cousins, and the family has a nickname for them: the Liars.

Cadence counts time by the age the Liars are each year. In summer fourteen, she and Gat begin to feel something for each other. Before the next summer arrives, two blows fall: her grandmother Tipper dies, and her parents divorce. When she returns for summer fifteen, Gat has a girlfriend back home. It does not stop the two of them from flirting, and now and then kissing. She describes the bond between them in her own plain way. She does not believe in destiny or soulmates. "I just mean we understood each other. All the way."

Then comes the event the whole book circles. During summer fifteen Cadence has what she is told was a swimming accident. She comes out of it with a brain injury the doctors cannot quite diagnose, with terrible migraines, and with large gaps where her memories of that summer ought to be. Afterward she stops hearing from Gat. Her life at home falls apart. She fails her classes, dyes her blond hair black, drifts away from her friends and gives up everything she used to do at school. The following year, summer sixteen, she is taken to Europe by her father and never sets foot on the island. She writes to the other Liars and hears nothing back, which wounds her deeply.

In the year that follows she takes up a peculiar project: she starts giving away her belongings, one thing at a time, wanting to be less attached to possessions. She also insists, over her mother's reluctance, on returning to Beechwood. In the end Penny arranges for her to spend four weeks there in summer seventeen.

She arrives determined to learn the truth about summer fifteen, and runs straight into a wall of kindness. Everyone gives her the same answer: the doctors have said she needs to remember without being told. So she watches and listens, and writes down what comes back. The Liars are there, and it is a relief to be among them again. But things on the island are different. Her grandfather's house has been rebuilt, sleek and new, and every one of Tipper's old things is gone. Her mother and her aunts, whom she now begins to recall locked in bitter quarrels, are getting along with a strange gentleness.

The fragments that return to her are mostly about those quarrels. With Tipper no longer there to keep the peace, the three sisters had fought ferociously that summer over the inheritance: who would get which house, which possessions, what share of the money. Their father had fed the fight, setting one daughter against another, because holding the fortune over their heads was his way of feeling in command. The mothers, in turn, had begun pushing their children to take sides and to work on their grandfather. And Harris, once he noticed what was growing between his eldest granddaughter and Gat, had turned cold toward the boy.

Woven through the present-day chapters are little fairy tales that Cadence writes, variations on a single story about a king with three beautiful daughters. They are her way of saying what she cannot yet say directly about her family.

Piece by piece, the picture of summer fifteen comes together, and Cadence moves toward the one memory she has been protected from. What that memory is must be left out here. Some readers say they guessed it; many more say it hit them hard regardless. Reviewers agree that the solution is carefully prepared and makes complete sense when it comes.

What It's Really About

On the surface this is a mystery about a lost summer. Underneath it is a study of wealth and what it does to a family. The Sinclair daughters have never had to build anything of their own, and so their sense of who they are depends on their father's approval and their share of his estate. One reviewer put the book's argument neatly: when your family pays your rent, your family is your job. Harris understands this perfectly and uses it. The result is a household in which love and leverage have become hard to tell apart, and in which the children are drafted into their parents' battles. Readers have noted that the book handles this theme more sharply than many novels written for adults.

It is also about the performance of perfection. The Sinclairs present a flawless face, and beneath it each of them is dealing with grief, fear and failure in a different way, some in outright denial. The book's own teasing description of them reads: "We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken." Gat's presence makes the cracks harder to ignore. As the outsider, he questions things the Sinclairs have never had to think about, and the grandfather's hostility to him brings in an uncomfortable thread about race and belonging.

Then there is memory, guilt and self-deception. Cadence is an unreliable narrator, though not a dishonest one; she is telling us everything she is able to know. Her headaches and her blank spaces are bound up with something she cannot face. The lesson several readers draw from the book is about owning what you have done and living with the consequences, and about how very hard that is when the lie you would have to give up is the one that is keeping you upright.

The style divides people. Lockhart writes in short, clipped lines and fragments that sometimes break like verse, and Cadence describes her emotional pain in violent physical images. Admirers find it beautiful, honest and close to poetry, and say it reads like pages from a diary. Others find it overwrought, though even they tend to concede it suits a disillusioned seventeen-year-old. The middle of the book, when neither Cadence nor the reader has much to go on, can feel slow to some. Critics have also pointed out that modern technology is oddly missing from these teenagers' lives, and that Gat could have been drawn with more depth.

What nearly everyone grants is the pull of it. The book is brief, it has a map and a family tree at the front, it is soaked in sun and salt water, and it is built to be read in a single sitting. Plenty of readers report doing exactly that, and crying at the end.

Who Should Read It

Pick this up if you like a mystery that plays fair, a narrator you cannot fully trust, or stories about glamorous families with rot under the floorboards. It is aimed at older teens, and adults read it just as avidly; it makes an ideal beach or one-night read. Readers who prefer plain, unadorned prose or deep character development may be less taken with it. Whatever you do, read it before somebody tells you the ending.