The Truthful Lodger

About the book

He has a rare condition that makes him physically incapable of lying. Not tactless, not blunt by temperament, but literally unable to produce an untruth, whatever the cost of saying it plainly instead. Taken in as a lodger by a married couple, he finds that radical honesty is not the simple gift it sounds like. Every question asked in his presence gets an answer, whether or not anyone was ready to hear it, and in a house already carrying its own quiet tensions, that kind of truth-telling doesn't stay contained for long. What starts as an awkward domestic arrangement becomes something none of the three of them saw coming, as the one thing this man cannot do, pretend, becomes the very thing that finally lets two people say what they had spent years not saying to each other, or to themselves. A frank, explicit, and surprisingly tender story about what happens when a household runs entirely without lies, and what three people discover about each other once there is nowhere left to hide.