SSFPL Book Club: The Little Liar by Mitch Albom

Mitch Albom is a screenwriter, philanthropist, journalist, broadcaster and author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written eight number-one New York Times bestsellers — including Tuesdays with Morrie. Following his bestselling memoir Finding Chika, and Human Touch, a weekly serial written and published online which raised nearly $1 million for pandemic relief, he returned to fiction with The Stranger in the Lifeboat, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestsellers. Mitch has also written award-winning TV films, stage plays, screenplays, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and a musical. He appeared for more than 20 years on EPN, and was a fixture on The Sports Reporters. Mitch was inducted into both the National Sports Media Association and Michigan Sports halls of fame and was the recipient of the Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. Albom now spends the majority of his time in philanthropic work. He created a dessert shop and popcorn line to fund programs for Detroit’s most underserved citizens.  Since 2010, Albom has operated the Have Faith Haiti orphanage in Port au Prince, which he visits every month without exception.

Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie. His schoolmate, Fannie, loves him because of it. Nico’s older brother Sebastian resents him for both these facts. Nico’s innocence and goodness is used against his tightly knit community when a German officer barters Nico’s reputation for honesty into a promise to save his loved ones. When Nico realizes the consequences of the betrayal, he can never tell the truth again. When their young lives are torn apart during the war, it will take them decades to find each other again. Nico will spend the rest of this life changing names, changing locations and identities, desperate to find a way to forgiveness—for himself and from the people he loves most.

Albom’s extraordinary storytelling is at its powerful best in his first novel to confront the destruction that lying can wreak both on the world stage as well as on the individual lives that get caught up in it. As The Stranger in the Lifeboat spoke to belief, The Little Liar speaks to hope, in a breathless page-turner that will break your heart open and fill it with the power of the human spirit and the goodness that lies within us all.