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An astonishing debut about a teenage girl in 1970s Brazil who is torn away from her twin sister—and who must learn what it means to fight for those she loves when all the odds are stacked against her.
Dolores and Mita grow up in rural Brazil, identical and inseparable. But Mita develops a mysterious illness that challenges the family. One day, Dolores wakes up to find her sister gone—sent to a hospital in their father's native London. There is no Dolores without Mita. And now Mita is gone.
When the family moves to Rio, Dolores' parents act as if Mita never existed. Lonely and grief-stricken, Dolores struggles to learn to read and write at the stodgy British School—until she meets Andrea, a headstrong, streetwise girl from the dangerous part of town. Andrea shows Dolores a new side of Rio—and how to survive it. As the dictatorship cracks down on dissenters, and people disappear, Dolores begins to wonder if her sister is dead, and her parents are lying. Determined to uncover the truth, Dolores is willing to do whatever it takes—lie, gamble and steal—to get her sister back.
Liar's Dice captures the precarious intensity of coming of age in a volatile time—when repression and silence are the fabric of everyday life—and the cost of family secrets. Heartrending and tender, Juliet Faithfull's debut novel is a testament to the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.
"Poignant, fresh, and often devastating." —Kirkus Reviews
"This compelling debut about a twin trying to stay connected to her disabled sister across years and miles in 1970s Brazil is pitch-perfect and full of heart, with language so evocative you can feel the heat of the summer and hear the rattle of gambling dice and envision the flash of sequins as the girls dance, for the last time, as a twosome." —Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name
"Liar's Dice is an unexpected take on the coming-of-age tale. This story of a girl's separation from her ailing twin in 1970s Brazil is a nuanced exploration of family dynamics, sisterhood, and the search for belonging." —Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake and Good Dirt
This information about Liar's Dice was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Juliet Faithfull is a Spanish-British-American writer who grew up in Brazil. Liar's Dice, her first novel, was a winner of the 2024 Irish Writers Centre's Novel Fair and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She was awarded a Pauline Scheer Fellowship by GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program, in Boston, and her short stories have been published in the Bellevue Literary Review and Urbanus Magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and Smith College School for Social Work, Juliet works as a trilingual psychotherapist and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her two sons.
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