Step inside 1749 London and you’ll find yourself elbow-deep in sugar, scandal, and schemes. Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s The Art of a Lie doesn’t just recreate the past—it wraps you in it, from the grime of the streets to the tension in the gambling halls and the shady characters behind those doors. The level of historical detail is extraordinary, from the confectionery craft to the way characters speak and carry themselves. I was completely transported—lost among the pages in a world I did not want to leave.
Told in four parts from two sharply drawn points of view, we follow Hannah Cole, a recently widowed confectioner trying to survive in a man’s world, and William Devereux, a mysterious “entrepreneur” with his own secrets and connections to Hannah’s late husband. Their narratives twist around each other, full of guarded truths, a list of lies and secrets each character wants to keep guarded and unspoken tension, until the arrival of a third force—former author turned magistrate Henry Fielding (yes that Henry Fielding author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 1979) —ratchets up the stakes. What begins as a slow unraveling of a possible inheritance turns into a dangerous game of deception and survival.
This is more than a cat-and-mouse thriller—it’s a masterclass in manipulation, where trust is fleeting and everyone is vulnerable to being molded to someone else's purpose. Hannah and William are both prisoners of their past, haunted by the lies they’ve told and the truths they fear. As alliances shift and the pressure builds, the question becomes not just who will win, but who will survive the lies intact.
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