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The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson

Contemporary fiction

The Kindest Lie

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Nancy Johnson, on your first book!

by Nancy Johnson

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Quick take

This sweeping story traces a woman's return to her struggling hometown—and the hope she finds in confronting her past.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Family_Drama

    Family drama

  • Illustrated icon, Teen

    Teens

  • Illustrated icon, Rural

    Rural

  • Illustrated icon, Marriage_Issues

    Marriage issues

Synopsis

It’s 2008, and the rise of Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He’s eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to—and abandoned—when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she’d never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past.

Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair. While her family is happy to see her, they remind her of the painful sacrifices to give Ruth a shot at a better future—like the comfortable middle-class life she now enjoys.

Determined, Ruth begins digging into the past. As she uncovers burning secrets her family desperately wants to hide, she unexpectedly befriends Midnight, a young white boy who is also adrift and looking for connection. When a traumatic incident strains the town’s already searing racial tensions, Ruth and Midnight find themselves on a collision course that could upend both their lives.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of The Kindest Lie.

The Kindest Lie

One

Ruth

No one talked about what happened in the summer of 1997 in the house where Ruth Tuttle had grown up. In fact, there were days she remained certain she had never given birth at all. Somehow, she convinced herself that her life began when she drove away from that little shotgun house in Indiana without her baby. She had been only seventeen.

A lie could be kind to you if you wanted it to be, if you let it. With every year that passed, it became easier to put more distance between her old life and her new one. If the titles of doctor and lawyer had signaled success back in the day, then engineer had to be the 2.0 symbol that you’d made it. And she had. With Yale University conferring her degree and lending its good name to her, there was no question. And if the proof weren’t in her pedigree, it manifested in her marriage to a PepsiCo marketing executive.

The upcoming presidential election stirred an unusual optimism in her husband, Xavier, and he fancied himself having everything new. First, he convinced her they should buy the new town house in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Then a new Lexus LX 570 that could easily seat eight. He wasn’t just angling for more leg room, either. Sooner rather than later, he wanted a baby. It’s time. When Xavier repeated those words, Ruth stretched her lips into a smile, neglecting to mention she was already a mother, if in name only.

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Why I love it

Some of my favorite books are those that explore what happens when the past reasserts itself and makes a claim on the present. In this sparkling debut that opens on the eve of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Nancy Johnson does just that and introduces an indelible, multigenerational cast of characters wrestling within a nation on the cusp of change but marked by the sins of its past.

Ruth Tuttle is a successful chemical engineer with an amazing husband she loves dearly, seemingly well on her way to claiming a part of the American Dream. But as her husband’s excitement over trying to start a family grows, Ruth’s long-held secret—that she had a baby in high school that she abandoned—begins to eat away at her. This implosion sends Ruth back to her hometown in search of her lost child and answers to the many mysteries of her family’s past.

Rare is the book that can speak equally effectively to the truths in our hearts as the issues roiling our national political conversations. But The Kindest Lie is just such a book. It masterfully captures the ways that lies—big and small, national and personal—can come to haunt us. I appreciate its care towards its characters and the attention Johnson pays to the weight of a history that is shared but not equally. This book makes a strong argument for confronting our past with courage and generosity so we might be able to forge ahead and build bonds that can weather the challenges of work, family, and romance.

Member ratings (11,910)

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Contemporary fiction
View all
The Last Love Note
What Does It Feel Like?
Anita de Monte Laughs Last
The Wedding People
Honey
The Leftover Woman
The Same Bright Stars
Bye, Baby
Swan Song
The Days I Loved You Most
The Connellys of County Down
Joe Nuthin’s Guide to Life
Jackpot Summer
Adelaide
The Collected Regrets of Clover
Again and Again
Evil Eye
Black Cake
Maame
Romantic Comedy
Someone Else’s Shoes
Once There Were Wolves
We Are the Brennans
The Bad Muslim Discount
What Comes After
Olga Dies Dreaming
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel
Monster in the Middle
Nine Perfect Strangers
The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany
The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes
Honey Girl
In Every Mirror She's Black
Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?
Sankofa
The Unsinkable Greta James
The Love of My Life
The Five-Star Weekend
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
The Wishing Game
Behold the Dreamers
The Mothers
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
Little Fires Everywhere
The Music Shop
Where’d You Go, Bernadette
The Reckless Oath We Made
Dear Edward
When We Were Vikings
The Girl with the Louding Voice
A Good Neighborhood
Big Summer
All Adults Here
Happy & You Know It
Friends and Strangers
The Comeback
True Story
The Last Story of Mina Lee
Troubles in Paradise
White Ivy
This Close to Okay
The Chicken Sisters
The Prophets
In a Book Club Far Away
The Other Black Girl
Apples Never Fall
A Quiet Life
We Are the Light
The Most Likely Club
The Fortunes of Jaded Women
When We Were Bright and Beautiful
The Hotel Nantucket