The White Lie

The White Lie (2012), a literary mystery by journalist and novelist Andrea Gillies, follows the lies of one Scottish family, the Salters, who try to cover up the death of the novel's narrator, 19-year-old Michael. Years later, at a family gathering, the Salters are forced to come to terms with the white lies they told when a witness finally comes clean, revealing a web of falsehoods that lead, inevitably, to the truth about Michael's death.

As the story opens, the narrator, 19-year-old Michael Salter, is speaking from the dead. He isn't sure of much, however, beyond his status as a spirit. Michael becomes the unlikely narrator of his own murder, which he investigates, unraveling the intricate and eccentric history of his family, who are struggling to maintain their status as aristocracy despite dwindling money and the shifting cultural landscape.

At the center of the book is the Peattie House where Michal was born and raised. Michael, the Salters’ son, had been the heir to the family name and remaining fortune. Four generations of Salters have lived in the Peattie House, located on a vast estate that includes a large loch in northern Scotland. The loch, and the web of lies surrounding generations of the Salter family, become the focus of the novel as Michael reflects on his watery death.



The mystery begins as Ursula, Michael's eccentric aunt, rushes into the house one day claiming that she murdered her nephew. The family searches for Michael's body, but cannot find any trace—he seems to have disappeared into the loch. Ursula and Alan, the adult son of the estate's odd jobs man, claim that Ursula and Michael got into an argument while on a boat in the loch, and Michael fell off the boat into the water. But without a body, the family cannot be certain what happened. They choose not to involve the police, and locals speculate on whether Michael was killed or if he killed himself.

There are several problems with Ursula's story, many of which are revealed a decade later, at a birthday party. A witness to Michael's death comes forward to cast doubt on the family's adapted version of events, and suddenly, everything begins to look suspicious. First of all, Ursula, who is terrified of water, would never be caught out in a rowboat. And Alan, the witness who corroborated her version of events, is unofficially known by the family to be Michael's real father, though Ottelie, Michael's mother, has never admitted his paternity.

It becomes increasingly clear as the novel goes on that the Salter family is more interested in saving their own reputations than revealing the truth, and this mystery reveals another, farther back in the family history, involving the death of a former heir. Though the truth about Michael's death is eventually revealed, the more important parts of the novel are Gillies's reflections on the fallibility of truth and personal history, and the way that families enact lies so forcefully that they become the new reality.



An English-born author from York, Gillies was educated in Scotland and worked in theatre, publicity, and journalism, before becoming a novelist. Her first book, the memoir, Keepers, was created from a diary she kept while caring for her mother for two years as she died from Alzheimer's Disease. Keepers won the Wellcome Award and the Orwell Prize. In 2012, Gillies published The White Lie, her debut novel, and in 2014, a second novel, The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay, which follows a woman trying to make sense of the love triangle that defined her married and now separated life.