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Doubleday
October 2010
On Sale: October 5, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 0385527217
EAN: 9780385527217
Hardcover
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Women's Fiction Contemporary
From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out . . . Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One afterยญnoon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celiaโs unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, theyโve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends donโt believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love canโt blind him to all that contraยญdicts Celiaโs version of the past. Celiaโs desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children becomeโleading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb.
 Media BuzzDiane Rehm Show - NPR - October 13, 2010
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