Lie With Me - Sabine Durrant - Book Review

I chose Lie With Me as my holiday read for this year and it was purchased from Amazon in one of their 3 for £10 deals and I started it pretty easily, unlike my last book (The Breakdown). It was a lot smoother and the story just flowed from the beginning. Within the first couple of pages, you're already questioning 'What girl? Who is she? What's happened to him? Where is he?' etc... Before beginning Lie With Me, I didn't know what to expect, the blurb didn't give much away. All I really took from it was that a man charms his way on to a family holiday and a lot of lies are told, which is essentially what happens. Paul, a 42 year old author, had a one hit wonder with a novel straight out of university but since has had nothing published, and has no home of his own to speak of. He meets Alice, who is a widower, through an old university friend and ends up on their family holiday to Greece, where things unfold there. 

I read a review of this book on Goodreads which gave it only 2.5* out of 5, which I can kind of understand. The main character Paul, is extremely egotistical, who has a passion for lying. He is very hard to like, at all, but I suppose that is what I enjoyed about the book. Even though at times he makes situations very uncomfortable and you know his lies are surely bound to catch up with him, I wanted to continue reading to find out what happens to him. You would like to think that obnoxious people like Paul get their comeuppance in the end. However, while Paul might have been an absolute horror, none of the characters were very likeable, all them at some point showed hints of obnoxiousness and often patronised each other. 

The story took a twist I was not expecting which was good but the ending was slightly disappointing for me personally. It wasn't really a resolution you could be satisfied with. I'm not sure, it would be nice to hear other peoples opinions about this one, because it's a difficult one. While I wasn't particularly satisfied with the ending I was with the writing of the book. The detail in it compared to the last book I read were completely different. I've seen a review saying this just made the story drag on but I found the amount of detail used was perfect, I could picture everything clearly and was fully immersed in the story. 

Would I recommend this book? Again it's difficult, I think people should form their own opinions of the book and the only way to do that is by reading it, but I'm torn because I enjoyed it for the way it was written, I'm just unsure about the story and the ending.