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  • Published: 2 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141367002
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $21.00

The Truth and Lies of Ella Black




This second novel from Emily Barr is a race-against-time thriller and a true coming-of-age story. It explores the highs and lows of first love, all set under a blazing Rio sun.

Ella Black seems to live the life most other seventeen-year-olds would kill for . . .

Until one day, telling her nothing, her parents whisk her off to Rio de Janeiro. Determined to find out why, Ella takes her chance and searches through their things.

And realises her life has been a lie.

Unable to comprehend the truth, Ella runs away, to the one place they'll never think to look - the favelas.

But there she learns a terrible secret - the truth about the deepest darkest side of herself . . .

  • Published: 2 January 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141367002
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $21.00

About the author

Emily Barr

Emily Barr worked as a journalist in London but always hankered after a quiet room and a book to write. She went travelling for a year, which gave her an idea for a novel set in the world of backpackers in Asia. This became Backpack, an adult thriller which won the WH Smith New Talent Award, and she has since written eleven more adult novels published in the UK and around the world. The One Memory of Flora Banks is her first novel for young adults. She lives in Cornwall with her partner and their children.

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Praise for The Truth and Lies of Ella Black

Barr is superb at evoking the heightened emotions of adolescence: the exhilarating thrill of first love, the intensity of fear and rage at adults' deception and the need to discover one's own identity. With disturbing undertones, vivid characters and authentic dialogue, this is a worthy successor to her wonderful debut, The One Memory of Flora Banks

Daily Mail

Evoking Ella's intoxicating new surroundings while skewering the facile assumptions of "poverty tourism", Barr's second YA novel is a fast-paced, dramatic search for answers to the secrets of the self

Guardian

Colourful setting and pacy plot. If you like dark fiction you'll devour it

Heat

Emily Barr already proved she could hit all the right teen-fiction notes in last year's The One Memory of Flora Banks. This taps the same vein. Ella's parents are doting to the point of smothering but they don't know about the dark and twisty part of her that threatens to destroy everything

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