Reese Witherspoon selected Alexandra Andrews’ The Fine Art of Lying as the latest pick for her popular book club.
Andrews’ novel, published Tuesday by Harper, follows Clare Bast, who abandoned her work on a Ph.D. in art to become a stay-at-home mother. She finds herself the target of a murder investigation after being drawn into an affair with Gabriel Prévost, a Manhattan gallerist who is killed in a home invasion. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a mystery bound up in astute social satire.”
Witherspoon announced the book’s selection in a video on Instagram. “This book is crazy,” she says. “It’s all about lying, and people making horrible decisions, and they’re all so wealthy, and it’s New York, and it’s the world of art. It’s just—and there’s a murder!…So crazy, so crazy. These people are in so much trouble.”
In an interview with the Boston Herald, Andrews said she wrote the book during the Covid-19 pandemic when she was raising her two young children.
“I wanted to write about this experience of just the discombobulation that you can get as a new mother and how you can lose a grip on the person you used to be,” she said. “I was interested in the idea of, What would happen if you made a life-changing decision when you’re not quite feeling like yourself?”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
