White Lies, my latest novel, will be out in paperback on Amazon within a few days.  It’s a story about an adoption seen from three angles.  The image continues on the back cover but in the Kindle version, shown above, the white band for the title makes it look as though it’s floating in space.  Maybe it’s appropriate for a white lie to float.

I’ve also discovered that several writers before me have called their novels White Lies.  Will this help or hinder potential sales?  I should have researched more carefully before deciding on the title – but never mind.  The much more problematic doubling-up is with my name.  I’m not the only fiction-writer called Susan Barrett.   Perhaps the other SBs are as put out as I was when I realised a doppelganger had snuck up beside me.

The story:-

Beth is a guest at a wedding.  The bride is Tess, her natural daughter, who’d been adopted as a baby.  During the moments leading up to the marriage ceremony, Beth recalls the lifetime events that led to her present state of sick fear.  Recent revelations have made her suspect that the bridegroom is the first child she’d given up for adoption, and therefore Tess’s half-brother.  Will she speak of this impediment to matrimony or, as invited by the priest, forever hold her peace?

White Lies gives the answer in a way that reveals the complexities of truth-telling in the context of adoption.  It is a story told from three perspectives: that of Beth, the natural mother; Liz, the adoptive mother, and Tess, her adopted daughter.  The reader’s sympathy is engaged with each woman in turn, as the intricacies of the plot demonstrate the joys and sorrows of adoption and how nature and nurture interplay in the formation of personality.