A Punch..
Powerful insight into the disintegration of a relationship and what it ultimately means to become a wife. The lies and the betrayal, the madness and the despair of a toxic and abusive relationship are laid bare and exposed relayed in a clipped and snappy manner. A punch and a therapeutic one indeed.

Jane had ordered a la carte and gotten everything she’d wanted. She told John that he would have to work consistently and effortfully to sabotage what they had.

John did not want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. He was just being honest. Was a seat at the table too much to ask? “We’re a team,” he said. Then he left without her.

They had been dating for two years, and she was about to turn thirty-five. She’d spent ten years repeatedly choosing the wrong people, leaving good ones because she believed she deserved only the ruined people. She had wanted that part of her life over already, and she was glad it finally was.

She was a real wife now, all she needed was for him to share in the housework, have one date a week with her, two weekly intimate sessions, and pay her back the seven grand he still owed her.

He slapped her face playfully, but it was too hard. It felt like a parlour game.

She was a liar… she just didn’t know it yet.

This book examines a marriage where even the word husband feels unsafe, and you feel uncomfortably complicit in the deepest parts of Jane’s pain where she’s trapped between neither wanting divorce, nor a disdainful partner blind to the consequences of his behaviour. This was an incredible read where the thin line between love and hate is irrevocably crossed. I could not look away, and yet I could neither bear witness at times to the brutality of this modern-day marriage story.

I would like to thank #NetGalley for sending me this arc in exchange for my honest review.

Liars by Sarah Manguso

The story of Jane and John, a 14-year relationship, one chlld and multiple moves across the US.

Brilliant! An amazing literary feat to fit 14 years into one novel and do it so successfully. I loved the way the story was told in short, sharp bursts. Loved and empathised with Jane's rage at the artist to house/everything manager journey. And really loved the last bit of the novel and Jane's 'realisation' (no spoilers!). Very VERY highly recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

This book is not easy to read and can be uncomfortable at times, to say the least. However, it is essential reading. It delves into the life of a woman and her marriage, with an intensity that many may find unsettling.

This may sound terribly rude, but I think the book will benefit from a re-write. Love the style and approach, but ultimately bored by the rant. Don't get me wrong, I'm with the protagonist all the way through and through, but something about the carelessness of the flow and progression of the narrative just didn't sit right with me. The first half I thought was spectacular, but it spiralled into something less so after that. On one hand I get that that suits the context, plot structure and all, but on the other hand I just wished it was done differently. Still really want Manguso to write loads more though. I think I am somewhat partial to her non-fiction but I suppose this is an irrelevant and unhelpful input.

An absorbing and compelling story of a toxic marriage and ultimate demise. Even though it's fiction it felt like a brutally honest take on a real couple - one lying to the other, and one lying to themselves about their situation. Great writing, hooked all the way through.

Liars is an intense, thought provoking and claustrophobic read.

Manguso is a highly talented writer, covering a relationship from initial meeting, marriage and birth of a child to a bitter divorce. The resulting novel is compelling, nuanced and well paced.

I did however struggle to read it as I found it to be very intense and harrowing. Not necessarily a book I’d recommend to most people but one I’m glad I’ve read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC.

I struggled a little with this one. While the story was great, the characters were a problem gir me. I think I have read too many books with n awful man making a woman's life hell, but her also making g some infuriating decisions!

"Liars" by Sarah Manguso was a captivating and thought-provoking read. The book brilliantly delves into the complexities of motherhood and a woman's journey through a toxic marriage. The author skillfully peels back the layers of the relationship, offering a compelling and addictive portrayal of how a marriage can unravel. Seeing the nuanced deterioration of the relationship throughout the seasons made it an engrossing and relatable book for me. Is a difficult book to read but it was very well-developed and well written

Liars is simply the story of the disintegration of a marriage.

So this book drove me a little crazy. At first it was because of the obvious - the husband is a Grade A waste of space. He is a typical gaslighter and does everything he can to trivialise his wife's achievements.

However my desire to throw the book through the window morphed somewhere around the halfway mark. Yes, the husband continues to be useless but the wife is such a martyr. She constantly moans about how little her husband does or how badly he does it then lists all the things she does. Then she tells us how her marriage is worth saving even though her husband is more hindrance than help.

Of course we know this is not an unusual story. It happens all the time- husband belittles wife; wife belittles husband; staying together because of a child. However it drove me slightly deranged because the woman kept on doing the same things over and over.

I would have edited this book down to half it's size. The whole last quarter of the book is just the wife moaning about things the husband was doing in his new relationship or things he'd done in theirs.

Far too much navel gazing and introspection for me. However if you like that sort of indepth analysis of a doomed marriage then this is the book for you.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the advance review copy.

Liars by Sarah Manguso evocatively depicts the struggles of motherhood and the breakdown of a woman's marriage to a toxic man.

I loved this book. It was beautifully written, easy to read and impossible to put down. But possibly kind of like a car crash where you’re checking the outcome in order to mitigate your own journey in the same vehicle. Wouldn’t recommend if you’re newly wed like myself, but it accurately portrays the challenges of modern marriage and the way societal pressures force us to deny the truth in front of us.

I wanted to like this book more but it just wasn’t for me. I had similar feelings towards as My Husband (the French novel). It felt very self-indulgent and frustrating. The husband is a red flag from the beginning. It’s frustrating watching the FMC giving him a chance again and again only for him to make the same mistakes. The last 30% was interesting - when she finally leaves her husband and we see her trying to come to terms with how patriarchal marriage still is and how it doesn’t really benefit women. An intriguing character-study of a toxic marriage but nothing groundbreaking.

‘Liars’ is a story about life, a woman’s life. She falls in love and marries in the hope not to be stuck in one of those relationships.
And yet here she is, her writing career halted, a husband who doesn’t help and blames her for everything that goes wrong in his life.

And she stays, for a long time. Which made me want to scream to a wall. And that’s also why I have been on edge this entire novel.

Jane, the protagonist writes her version of her story every now and then and overlooking on a lot of the negative parts of it. Lying to herself on why she has to stay in an abusive relationship that makes her feel tiny, worthless, makes her question am I really the way he says I am?

The writing style was very refreshing and fast paced. As someone who gets distracted if the paragraph is too long, the short biting fragments describing their relationships really drew me in and really made me enjoy it.

A very compelling read that was hard to put down and made me feel pure anger and empathy for Jane and the child.

“Inflicting abuse isn’t the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.”

I am really obsessed with this book and I hope you are going to be too when it comes out in August. And I advise you, get your annotating stuff ready because this one is a good one.

Liars is the story of a toxic relationship between Jane, our narrator, and John. Written in short, sharp sections, which details their lives over a prolonged period, this is a suffocating, frightening read. You long for Jane to find happiness, and Sarah Manguso does a superb job of showing us why women stay in unhealthy relationships.

I read this novel in one sitting, it's simple narration and structure becoming increasingly compelling with each page. It must be difficult to write about these things, and Manguso faces the challenges head-on, she doesn't sugar-coat, she doesn't use overly sentimental language to sway you one way or the other. She just shows reality, as it is, in all its ugliness and occasional beauty. This was a very fine novel indeed.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

I received this ARC from NetGalley and Pan Macmillan | Picador in exchange for a free and honest review.

A quick and difficult read. This book tackles very important issues that may occur in a marriage/ relationship such as: mental health, abuse, weaponised incompetence, jealousy etc. The story follows a toxic marriage; where the wife submits and is put in a situation where she can't get any sort of stability. I would recommend this book to everyone, so that they can identify signs of abuse and take steps to leave such a situation.

“I had infinite patience with my one-year-old, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a two-year-old, and almost no patience with my husband, whom I held to the behavioral standards of a mother.”

“Then I feared that trying to stay a writer would render me unrecognizable, just burned to a husk by frustrated rage. That was the one part of my life, I thought, in which I could exercise choice. Wifehood and motherhood were unassailably permanent, I thought.”

From: Liars by Sarah Manguso

How to describe this feverish book. I read it in a two or three long sessions (staying up way too late) because it just kept pulling at me to read on.

It’s one of the many books I’ve read in the past year about motherhood and also about trying to create art while being a mother, or a wife for that matter, or even a woman. But even though at first I thought… again?! This book does bring something new to the table. Or at least does it in a new way.

The amount of impotent rage Manguso manages to wake up in me while reading about the relationship in this book is astounding. I kept thinking: why doesn’t she leave this guy?! But let’s be honest: I’ve been in an unhealthy relationship earlier in life and it took a lot of convincing by my friends and family that I deserved better and luckily that helped me end things.

Anyway. This book made me feel so anxious, so angry, so sad and it also was able to make me laugh out loud and all of that in quick succession in a relatively short novel. It really is a great read and I recommend it to anyone who feels mentally up for this level of toxic.

Thanks so much to @panmacmillan and @netgalley for the ARC!
📚📖💙

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This book really highlights the pain and hardships modern women go through in relationships and motherhood. I related to this book so much in so many ways. It shows how whilst women do have more rights and there is change happening in the world towards women, there are still some deeply rooted sexist/misogynistic things going on in the world which still to this day push women to be with the wrong man. It also does a good job at explaining why women tend to stay with men who make them unhappy.

Not quite a 5 star as I the writing style wasn't my favourite, it is good and the author is amazing but I think some parts were a bit messy?

Thank you, 4 stars.

I am on my first re-read of this gut punch of a book which is currently color coded with my first read’s kindle highlights. To say I identify with our narrator, would be an understatement and to say every woman that is or plans to be a wife or mother should read this, is the understatement of the year. “I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing”. The story reads like a diary, but with impactful heart-stilling prose. Sarah Manguso writes beautifully and painfully, metaphorically and straight to the point. The story follows an artist, turned partner, turned wife turned mother and her desperately docile attempts to keep her own head above the water that is her husband/other. “ John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong”. This is a book for any woman who has ever held the misunderstanding that she is not the main character. 10/10 no notes

Thank you netgalley and publisher for my free copy in exchange for an honest review. Thank you also to the author for being brave and brilliant.

This book stressed me out, but in a good way (I think). I definitely understood what the author was trying to do here and if anything it taught me that the sanctity of marriage means nothing. Great writing though!