Lies

Paul Sheldon Fisher III has built his life on one conviction: That the truth is knowable -- and he's the one who knows it best.

A historian, genealogist, and newspaper reporter, Paul has spent decades explaining the world with absolute certainty. Every event has a cause. Every accusation has an answer. And every broken relationship has someone else to blame.

But certainty comes with a cost.

Now in his forties -- isolated, disgraced, and far from his family -- Paul receives an unexpected message from the son he has never known. The young man wants answers about the father who disappeared, and the events that that led up to his birth.

So Paul begins to share his life's story the only way he knows how: His way, with no room for disagreement.

Paul's past includes a brilliant but combative academic career, a passionate and volatile romance with the woman who became his son's mother, and a scandal that destroyed his reputation and cost him his job as a teacher. With unwavering confidence, Paul explains his troubles as the fault of others.

Yet beneath his carefully constructed narrative, there is another story... one of intellectual arrogance, emotional blindness, and the quiet repetition of the very failures he condemns in his own father.

As Paul struggles to define the facts of his life, one question lingers: Is this the real story? Or just the lies he always told himself?

Lies is a sharp, psychologically layered novel about memory, ego, and the stories we construct to survive our own past -- reminding us that understanding the truth often requires listening to what's never been said.