By Helen Callaghan (Michael Joseph) $37
Reminiscent of the style of Robert Goddard, Helen Callaghan seems to be a natural storyteller.
In Everything is Lies, Sophia, a young architect, provides the eyes through which we see a tale of a life that has been lived out in a desperate need for nearanonymity.
Visiting her original home in the Suffolk countryside, Sophia finds her mother, Nina, dead – hanging from a tree in the garden. Nearby is her father, covered in blood and barely alive.
From a police perspective, this looks like a case of attempted murder followed by suicide, Sophia’s mother the perpetrator.
Sophia cannot believe this, knowing her mother as a timid, reticent, unworldly woman who has barely ever left her countryside garden and the tea-house she has run. So, with the occasional help of Rowan, her childhood friend who lives nearby with his family, and who ran the garden side of the the small establishment, Sophia sets out to find ‘‘the truth’’.
This is clearly a fine start to a mystery. And the unravelling of the mystery does not disappoint. Sophia has a surprising call from a publisher, saying that her mother had been in the final stages of writing a book and enquiring whether or not Sophia has found her mother’s notebooks. She can scarcely believe that her timid mother had been writing a book and that a publisher seemed to be extremely interested in it.
Of course, Sophia finds two of the three notebooks and so we then have a story within a story. It begins with Nina’s account of first leaving her home (where she had been dominated by austere, unloving parents) and going to university.
There she begins steadily, although naively, until chance leads her into contact with Aaron Kessler, the ex-singer from a wellknown band, a charismatic man who appears to have a formed a semi-mystical group of people who are seeking some form of spiritual creativity.
Nina is gradually drawn into the group, enormously flattered by the attentions, including sexual, of Aaron, who seems to be more enamoured of her than the other young women in the group. Thus Nina becomes part of the cult and the story evolves from there.
From Sophia’s perspective, as she reads the notebooks and watches her father gradually regain consciousness in the