Frances Hardinge (2015) The Lie Tree.

I don’t read a lot of young adult or children’s fiction, but for any budding writers the Costa Book of the Year 2015 is pretty much perfect. The narrator of the story, Faith Sunderlay, is at that in-between age where she’s considered neither girl nor women, on the cusp of making her Confirmation. Her father Reverend Erasmus Sunderlay is, as you’d expect with a name like that next to God, in the eyes of his family and Victorian society. Faith’s mother Myrtle is pretty and ‘has a number of tricks for handling men, a little coquetry she summoned as easily and reflexively as opening her fan’. Myrtle has decided to take Faith in hand, because Faith is precocious, pig-headed and sneaky but in a different way than her mother. She has no time for men or coquetry but wants to be like her father, respected for his great learning and palaeontological knowledge. She aches to be his successor and shows great promise, but she has a younger brother Howard to take care of and she’s a girl. God, of course, is a man, an Englishman and although some may be as useless as her affable and round-faced Uncle Miles, a proper young lady should learn how not to think too much, which might tax their smaller heads and minds and learn the far better lesson of deference to their betters.  

Hardinge has fun with such notions. When the family decamp from their house in Kent to a small island, Vane, and an archaeological dig to escape some unspecified scandal, Faith decided to find out what it is and to help her father, because as sure as God was in heaven, he could never be ‘A fraud and a cheat’.   

If her father is a fraud and a cheat he must have very good reasons for being so. Her father is also behaving rather strangely. When Faith interrupts him in the library she thinks he might be an opium addict, but it’s much worse than that. Her father has risked everything for the fruit of The Lie Tree.

The Lie Tree has a vampire like quality. It combusts in natural daylight and survives in dank and dark surroundings and the Reverend Sunderlay’s notebooks and drawings offer conjecture that it feeds on whispered lies and the greater the lie the faster it grows and the bigger the fruit it offers. For those that dare feed on the fruit of The Lie Tree it offers God like powers to see the hidden patterns and motives of men and women. Reverend Sunderlay has fed on it. And when he dies, an apparent suicide, Faith must cultivate the fruit of The Lie Tree to find out who has murdered him.

Cut off from the Church, cut off from polite society, her father’s suicide threatens whatever money they had. Disgrace and the workhouse beckon. Only Faith can save the Sunderlay family.  Have Faith in Faith, and read on.