The Quiet Concert: There Will Be Lies by Nick Lake Guest Post

Title: There Will Be Lies
Author: Nick Lake
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Release Date: January 6th, 2015

Summary from Goodreads:

In four hours, Shelby Jane Cooper will be struck by a car.

Shortly after, she and her mother will leave the hospital and set out on a winding journey toward the Grand Canyon.

All Shelby knows is that they’re running from dangers only her mother understands. And the further they travel, the more Shelby questions everything about her past—and her current reality. Forced to take advantage of the kindness of unsuspecting travelers, Shelby grapples with what’s real, what isn’t, and who she can trust . . . if anybody.

Award-winning author Nick Lake proves his skills as a master storyteller in this heart-pounding new novel. This emotionally charged thrill ride leads to a shocking ending that will have readers flipping back to the beginning.

Nicole and I are so excited to start off the There will Be Lies Blog Tour, later this month we will also be posting our review of the book with a giveaway thanks to Bloomsbury! To start off the tour we have a guest post written by Nick Lake about Inspiration.

Guest Post

Inspiration

There Will be Lies begins with Shelby, living at home in Arizona in a very protected environment with her single mother. She’s home schooled, she doesn’t go out, she’s been taught to fear men. Her father died long ago. Then Shelby gets hit by a car and, lying on the kerb, sees a coyote appear between buildings. The coyote says, “There will be two lies, and then there will be the truth, and that will be the worst of all”. Shelby wakes up in hospital, her ankle injured, and pretty soon her mom is whisking her out of there, and into a hired car with all their belongings. She tells Shelby that her father is really alive, wants to kill them, and can find them now that the hospital know their names. But that’s just the first lie…

There Will Be Lies is kind of a weird book.

On the one hand, it’s got a talking coyote in it – actually Coyote with a capital C from Navajo myth – and on the other hand it’s very much contemporary realistic YA about a young girl whose life gets turned upside down. It has two things going on.

And, not coincidentally, it had two sources of inspiration.

But There Will Be Lies also rotates on the fulcrum of a twist, which arrives half way through the book.

A big twist.

This is a problem when it comes to talking about the book, and not giving anything away. I want to say for example, when it comes to the inspiration, that I was thinking about a story in the news about—

No.

Or that I was fascinated by that documentary film in which—

No.

Everything I start to say leads to the revelation, and I want you to experience the revelation as intended, as a shock. What doesn’t help is that There Will be Lies is also a difficult book to describe, period. It takes place in the real world, and in many ways is a thriller, but also it is… something else. It’s contemporary YA, a chase story with cars and guns and canyons and motels, set in the Arizona desert and woods, but it’s also… something else. And again, I want this to be something the reader finds out for themselves.

Which really only leaves me with two experiences of mine I can discuss, in terms of the book’s genesis.

First: I was standing in the grounds of a hotel in Arizona, late at night, when a coyote ran across the path and stopped, held my eyes for what felt like eons. Ironically, for a writer, I think mostly in images and find it very difficult to express the feeling of that moment in words. But the picture that is in my head, now, as I think of it, is this: an X-ray of an elbow, revealing the normally invisible, oh-so-elegant joint under the skin. As if, looking into the coyote’s eyes, I briefly apprehended some structure, some articulation of inter-connection between the surface of reality – or like a curtain was parted, to show me something holy and eternal behind the world. I have a complicated relationship with religion but there are a couple of times when I have felt this kind of minor ephiphany, I guess you could call it, the other being when my wife and I stumbled on a giant turtle laying its eggs on a beach in Mexico, by moonlight. It’s that thing that Moby Dick gets at – that idea that there is something on the other side of the air, and for me it’s always been in the eyes of animals, built by billions of years of genes, locking onto mine for an instant.

Anyway.

Then the coyote blinked, turned, skittered away on slippery paws.

And now for the contemporary side of the story.

I was at a publishing party a few months later and my agent asked me if I had an idea for my next book, and the true answer was, “No”. But I was also thinking about those two things, the dream and the meeting with the coyote, as well as that story I’d been following in the news about—

Oh, yeah, no.

OK, but less specifically, without spoiling anything: I had a very young daughter at the time, and I was interested in exploring some of my worst fears, as a parent, in a story. (I still have her, I should add; she’s just marginally older now.) To say more would be a spoiler, but yes, that parental fear was a catalyst two, the other spark along with the coyote that made the electric circuit of the book.

So I took those things: the dream with the crossing into another world, those strange words spoken by the guide, which remained in my head even when I woke; the encounter with the coyote; my parental fears; and threw them into the air in my mind and, even though a minute before he asked I really hadn’t had a story, I said to my agent, “Yes, I think I know what I’m going to write.”

Then I spent half an hour telling him the story, making it up as I went along, feeling it all slot into place. And he told me to write it down.

So I did.

We agreed, when we sent it to my publishers, that we wouldn’t tell them the twist. If you read the book, please don’t tell anyone either.

About the Author

Nick Lake is the much-acclaimed author of In Darkness, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, and Hostage Three, which received three starred reviews and was named a Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Boston Globe Best Book of the Year. He is also the Publishing Director for fiction at HarperCollins Children's Books UK. Nick lives near Oxford, England. Visit him online at www.in-darkness.org and on Twitter at @NicholasLake.