Soon about to be released as a miniseries with Sarah Michelle Gellar in the leading role, author Alice Feeney’s intense mystery thriller novel Sometimes I Lie is a book that came out in 2017. With almost fifteen books published and the title of New York Times Best Seller, Feeney has managed to sell well over a million copies of her novels.
Alice is known to have switched careers, going from working as a BBC journalist to a full-time writer, and this success has been met with nothing else but success. Not just Sometimes I Lie, but another one of her books titled Rock Paper Scissors is getting adapted into a television series.
The writer is currently put up in Devon, and you might recognize her from her other popular novel, Good Bad Girl, one that had the readers raving about on social media. The book Sometimes I Lie follows the story of a woman named Amber Reynolds, who has three facts she wants the readers to know about her before getting into the story.
Amber is a married woman who is, first, in a state of coma, though she still has conscious awareness. Second, she is convinced her husband does not love her, and third, sometimes she lies. The book, written throughout almost four hundred pages, is written from different perspectives, covering the story of her childhood, her recent past, and the present.
The book introduces us to Amber, who has been hospitalized, and after gaining consciousness, she realizes that she cannot move her body, talk, or even open her eyes. While the doctors and her husband seem to think that she is deep in a state of coma, it is only Amber who knows that she can hear and process everything happening around her.
She does not remember how she got to the hospital in the state that she was in, but she is fully convinced her husband had something to do with it. Throughout the book, we go back and forth from Amber’s childhood to her current paralyzed state to the week that led up to her accident.
At the end of it all, Amber knows something that she believes to be completely true. The book sets out to question if something is even a lie if you believe it to be true for you. The book is a rollercoaster ride of emotions, and it has all the mystery tropes that you could think of and more.
It throws you twists and turns in such a clever and engaging way, making it difficult for you to put the novel down. The book is cleverly written, and we would recommend it to fans of mystery thrillers, no doubt. But if you want to know more about the plot of the book and its ending explained, then you can find them below, but beware of some major spoilers.
Sometimes I Lie Ending Explained
Right off the bat, the book introduces us to Amber, our leading lady, who claims that sometimes she lies, which is interesting because she is also the narrator of the entire story, and we are not sure if we can trust all that well. We are told that before getting on the hospital bed, Amber was an assistant TV producer working for a hit BBC radio program.
With the introductions done, we are told that Amber is actually in a hospital, stuck in a state of coma. The doctors believe her to be deep asleep, but she can hear everything. It is frustrating for her to not be able to move, talk, or even tell the doctors somehow that she can hear them, that she is awake in a sense.
After realizing that she is stuck the way she is, she listens in and picks up on the fragments of conversation that continue to take place around her, paying special attention to the ones involving the nurses and her husband, Paul, a popular writer, and her sister, Claire.
With the wife in a coma, we know the police are likely to suspect the husband, so it happens. She figures that Paul has been under investigation because the police think that he might have something to do with her accident.
Meet Amber & Paul
Amber reveals to us that ever since Paul put out his first book, which threw fame his way, the couple has grown distant. Not just this, she had convinced herself that her husband was romantically involved with her sister, Claire. With Amber in bed, we are told more about her past, whatever she could remember from the days that led to the accident.
She had been working a futile job with a horrible boss, whom she had planned on getting rid of with the help of her friend, Jo. She successfully manages to remove Madeline, her boss, out of the way through cunning ways, and we do not know if we can trust her or not.
Amber tells us that she was pregnant and had been waiting to tell her husband the news, hoping that their child might be able to save their drowning marriage. Another incident that makes us lose faith in Amber is when she bumps into her ex-boyfriend, Edward, who is filled with rage directed at Amber because the latter had made him lose his medical career due to certain accusations.
But this faith is slightly restored when we are also told that it was not Amber but her sister, Claire, who had filed the complaint against the man, accusing him of making inappropriate advances. With whatever we know of the characters, not one has managed to form a clean image, and almost all of them seem twisted in some manner.
Twenty Years in the Past
We are taken back twenty years to 1991 to the pages of a diary we first think belongs to Amber, only to find out later that it was written by Claire. Turns out Claire is not Amber’s sister but a friend, and she is also not all that reliable as a character.
As a child, she had moved schools a lot, mostly because of her violent tendencies as a ten-year-old. Eventually, she found Amber, who replaced her imaginary fellows and became her first-ever real friend. The two got closer over time, with Claire even protecting Amber from school bullies.
After Claire’s parents passed away in a house fire on Christmas, she got adopted by Amber’s parents. Claire’s violent acts had only grown over time; she had pushed her very pregnant mother from the stairs once, and it was she who had set the house on fire, too.
Amber’s parents and other adults around them seemed to have not noticed anything off in the two children; instead, the former’s parents treated Claire with more love and care. We are thrown into the present timeline once again, only to be told that Amber had lost her child during the accident.
Claire and Amber seem to share a complicated relationship where Ambr hates Claire for taking away her parents’ attention from her, but she also loves her because the latter is always there to protect her.
The Present Timeline
Amber remembers, in flashes, that the day she had met with Edward, the two had lunch together, and she had even slept with him in his apartment, though she believed she had been drugged. Following this meeting, Edward even visited her home, only to hit her violently till Paul came home to help her.
Amber has another worry on her mind: the need to hide Claire’s diary from twenty years ago, which she had kept safely away in her attic. Back in the present, Amber’s room has a visitor, one that has been visiting her often at night.
It is Edward who comes to taunt her on how things turned out for her, and in one instance, he even ends up raping the helpless woman. Thankfully, the crime was caught on camera, and that was that for Edward. Amber was getting desperate to let her husband know that she was awake.
With passing days, she could hear talks of getting her off the life support system, and finally, she managed to muster all her energy to lift a finger, enough for her husband to know that she was here.
The Ending Explained
She remembered what happened the day of the accident, revealing to us that Claire was supposed to take her to the hospital because she was having a possible miscarriage.
When the accident took place, Claire left her in the car, bleeding, thinking that she had died. After a time skip, we are taken to a new present where the couple, Amber and Paul, are back together, and the former has been recovering well.
She reveals yet another secret to us that she had poisoned and killed both Claire and her husband and adopted their two kids. Edward, who was supposed to be in jail, was missing, and Amber thinks that might have been her sister’s doing. Anybody bad to Amber suffers consequences, usually at Claire’s hands.
Claire’s truth had been mentioned in the diaries that Amber had so well hidden in her attic, and finally, she had found the time to burn them to get rid of them, to finally get back to her life with Paul.
Amber had manipulated Paul without the guy even knowing. She had lied blatantly, murdered people for her convenience, and introduced us to these characters, all from her perspective. We know only what she had wanted us to, and by the time the book wraps up, we don’t know if we should even trust this manipulative liar of a lead since she had boldly claimed at the start that sometimes she lies.
With not a single likable character in the book and every single one of them having a motive to harm our lead, we question the characters throughout. The end reveals to us that it was Claire who had left Amber in the car, assuming she was dead. That Claire claimed in the diaries, she burnt her parents alive because Amber made her do it.
While the book ends with Paul and Amber back together, we don’t know what to believe anymore because of the unreliable narrator and all of the dead people.
