Family of Liars

The Island Before the Disaster

The Sinclair family — wealthy beyond the ordinary conception of wealth, self-mythologised to the point of dysfunction, possessed of a private island where every summer repeats the rituals of summers past — has been fully established in We Were Liars, E. Lockhart’s 2014 novel that arrived with a now-famous twist and spent years on bestseller lists.

Family of Liars is a prequel set in 1987, when Carrie — the grandmother of We Were Liars’ narrator Cadence — was a teenager on Beechwood Island. The summer that the novel traces is the one that set the patterns everything else would repeat: the secrets, the silences, the specific architecture of Sinclair family damage.

Carrie is a better protagonist than Cadence. This is not a slight against the original novel’s narrator but a genuine observation about complexity: Carrie makes worse decisions for more interesting reasons. She is more aware of what she is doing and less able to stop herself, which is a more difficult form of self-knowledge to write and a more disturbing one to read.

1987 and the Sinclair World

Lockhart’s decision to set the prequel in 1987 is a good one. The decade adds specific texture — the particular Reagan-era quality of Sinclair wealth, the way that certain conversations about race and class and gender would have been conducted differently in that year, the aesthetic touchstones that date the world precisely. The timeless quality of the original novel (which deliberately avoided dating itself) is replaced here with a specific historical moment, and the Sinclairs look somewhat different for it.

The island setting is as atmospheric as in the original: the private paradise that requires continuous performance, the boats and the clambakes and the deference of staff, the way that physical beauty is used as a proxy for moral worth. Lockhart knows this world and renders it with the eye of someone who has thought hard about how luxury functions.

The Secrets

Without detailing the specific revelations, Family of Liars concerns what Carrie does during the summer in question — a romantic entanglement, a friendship with consequences, a moral failure that she will spend decades not entirely acknowledging. The secrets she creates and buries in 1987 are the seeds of the Sinclair family’s eventual catastrophe.

Lockhart manages the dual satisfaction of prequel and mystery here: readers of We Were Liars will recognise the antecedents of what they already know; new readers will find the mystery resolution satisfying on its own terms.

Prequels and Their Dangers

The danger of prequels is well-documented: they can diminish the original by explaining things that were better left mysterious, or they can feel like cash-grab extensions of popular properties. Family of Liars avoids both traps. It deepens rather than diminishes — the Sinclair family is more interesting and more damned for having this additional context.

This is partly because Lockhart is interested in the same questions in both books: what happens when families tell themselves stories that don’t include the truth, and what it costs everyone.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A worthy prequel that stands on its own while deepening the Sinclair world. Carrie is a richer protagonist than her granddaughter, and 1987 is the right setting for this darkness.