A Novel · Inkshares · March 16, 2027
She teaches the literature of liars. She married one.
A wry grief-com about secrets, scandals, and a gutted house on a lake in upstate New York. Anna reads other people’s affairs for a living. She never saw her own coming.
The book
Part love story, part reckoning, honest the whole way through.
Anna is a new mother in a new town, rebuilding a gutted house on a lake in upstate New York. When her husband dies in a car accident with his mistress, she is left to raise their daughter alone and to sort the truth of her marriage from the lies. The affair, it turns out, was the least of what he kept from her.
Anna has spent her career teaching the great literature of infidelity: Madame Bovary, Hester Prynne, all their ruined women. She, of all people, should have seen it. That is the joke the book keeps, and the ache underneath it.
Madame Bovary and Hester Prynne were her closest friends. She still didn’t see it coming.
Which Face Is TrueWhy readers will love it
A book that starts an argument, in the best way.
A narrator your book club will fight about
Anna teaches the literature of liars for a living, then misses the liar in her own kitchen. She is sharp, funny, and not always easy to forgive.
Funny in the places you brace for sad
The grief is real. So is the comedy. Anna survives the worst year of her life by refusing to be solemn about it, and the book lets her.
A lake town you can feel
Small-town upstate New York in the off-season: cold water, lit windows, and a house being put back together one room at a time.
The Finger Lakes
A place you can feel on the page.
Small-town water, off-season light, and a house being rebuilt one room at a time. The setting is a character too.
Photo by Heather HenriksenThe author
Meet Sonja
Sonja Roberts studied theater and dance at Wells College, on the shores of Cayuga Lake, and has since worked as everything from a regional-theater actor to a magician’s assistant in Las Vegas. An empty bank account led her to corporate America; a need for a creative outlet led her back to writing. She now lives in Maine. Which Face Is True is her debut novel.
For book clubs
Made to be argued over.
Which Face Is True is built for a room full of opinions: a morally complicated narrator, a marriage to take apart, and a last act that rearranges everything before it. Sonja loves dropping in on book clubs by video call.
The newsletter
Notes from the coast.
Sonja writes about the book, the writing life, and the small strange business of being a person, over on Substack. Come for the essays, stay for the countdown to March 16, 2027.
Events & signings
Come say hello in 2027.
Release-week signings and virtual book-club drop-ins are being planned for spring 2027. Dates will land here first.