The Lies They Told

Description

Set in rural 1930s Virginia, The Lies They Told is a powerful historical novel about immigration, prejudice, survival and one young mother’s fight to protect her family against America’s growing eugenics movement.

Lena Conti arrives at Ellis Island with her two-year-old daughter, her mother and her teenage brother, hoping to build a better life after years of poverty and near starvation. But the immigration process quickly becomes a nightmare. Her mother and brother are labelled burdens to society and deported to Germany, leaving Lena alone in an unfamiliar country with a young child to protect.

A widowed family relative, Silas Wolfe, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where she is expected to care for his home and children. Although the surrounding hills remind Lena of her homeland, she soon realises that something is deeply wrong. The children hide when the sheriff arrives, and the tight-knit community lives under increasing pressure from authorities determined to portray them as ignorant, immoral and unfit.

As Virginia’s eugenics policies threaten families with eviction, the removal of their children and forced institutionalisation, Lena herself comes under scrutiny. When a social worker accuses her of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, she is sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics.

Faced with impossible choices, Lena must find a way to reunite with her daughter while protecting the people and community she has come to love.