About this title: Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel, by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic. Adrian Healey is magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life; unprepared too for the afternoon in Salzburg when he will witness the savage murder of a Hungarian violinist; unprepared to learn about the Mendax ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Random House (UK)
Date Published: 1997
ISBN-13:9780749305406ISBN:0749305401
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Book is in excellent condition-ONLY flaw is minimal edgewear on cover. Pgs are clean and tight. SHIPS V FAST! ! Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Soho Press
Date Published: 7/1/2003
ISBN-13:9781569470121ISBN:156947012X
Description: Fair. 156947012X Ships from PA, Return within 10 days for any reasons. Fast Shipping. Wear on corners and edges. Dog eared pages. The book is cocked. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Soho Press
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9781569470121ISBN:156947012X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Unmarked pages. Light cover wear. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 280 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Arrow Books
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780099421269ISBN:0099421267
Description: Grade: C. Catalog: Fiction General Synopsis: 367 pages. Fry's hilarious novel has won praise from critics everywhere, and it hit the very top of bestseller lists in England. Its bisexual hero is... read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
By Adam,
Liverpool, Merseyside, The United Kingdom
"Stephen Fry has to be the person on this Earth who I admire more than any other and, reading quite a few reviews of this very book, alot of people would say the same thing.
This book, I feel, is a definate 4 star piece. I was disappointed by the interludes of flashbacks between chapters. This was mainly due to my inability to see where they placed within the narrative, however, I don't know if they fully worked. Saying that, I actually don't think that they took away from the story as a whole.
I greatly enjoyed Adrian Healey's likeness, in places, to Oscar Wilde, being a huge Wilde fan, and found him quite easy to associate with.
Mostly, this book made me crave for the opportunity to go to University again, and study amongst people of your own age and in a location where you can build a new life for yourself."
By Victoria,
Stirling, Scotland, The United Kingdom
"The Liar is a wonderfully bizarre book, with many laugh-out-loud moments (it's Stephen Fry, so that's to be expected), that'll have you snorting tea through your nose if you're not careful. Although a little difficult to follow at times, and a plot that seems non-existent at certain points, Fry's first novel is a brave attempt at capturing the truth but ultimately is just a load of tosh!"
"I listened to Mr. Fry read his book and really enjoyed myself. Like others I'm more in love with his characters especially Adrian and Professor Trefusis than with the espionage plot. I'm probably a poor listener but I was convinced that the opening scene was an art theft and not a murder until things became clearer later in the book. Still all was entertainingly frothy. I would have liked more school boy suicides and Dickensian pornography but perhaps the next book..."
"In my reading experience, an author's first novel tends to be a very thinly-veiled fictionalization of their own life, usually including awkward meditations on all the resentments and obsessions of their life up to that point and other things that the outside world was better off not knowing. The parts that do happen to be genuinely created from scratch tend to be campy and flat and usually stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the novel. The Liar, Stephen Fry's first novel, is no exception to this general rule.
This book is 75% Fry's autobiography and 25% international espionage. The plot alternates clumsily between the mundane life of Adrian, a homosexual guy growing up in the 1970s in Britain (where Adrian = Stephen Fry), and the exciting and confusing world of Austrian espionage. Why Austria, you may ask? Beats me. Maybe Fry had recently taken a trip to Austria when he wrote the book, and wanted to include a bunch of obscure street names and German words in his story. I still don't understand this section of the book, but I don't think I'm missing much. I recognize that this section, and the book as a whole, was supposed to be funny, but it left me cold.
In any event, Fry does a good job of telling the autobiographical parts of the book in an engaging way, which probably isn't as easy a task as it sounds. However, the "serious"/made-up portion of the book is too melodramatic, confusing, and irrelevant to the vast majority of the story, so those parts were all really frustrating to sit through. The multiple references to cricket and the descriptions of cricket games could have been cut, too - since cricket had no bearing on the plot, the extended references just seemed like gratuitous fandom on his part (he's a huge cricket fan, apparently). Fry is very good at being funny and writing about human relationships (at least between men - I guess that's to be expected from a gay author), but he's awful at writing about action or mystery in an interesting or compelling - or even comprehensible - way. He's better off sticking to the micro of everyday life rather than large-scale machinations like politics or government or really anything outside of British boarding school life.
The only context in which I'd recommend this book is if you're a huge Stephen Fry fan and you want to learn more about his life or see what he's like as a writer. But it's not really a book that can stand on its own merits."
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