It didn’t have any emotional punch or story-power.

It was just another oddity, rattling around loosely in the setting. I came up with several, but somehow the lie tree itself got lost in them. It is just a matter of working out how the stone needs to be cut and set.Īnd for a while I couldn’t work that out at all.Īt first I planned to set the story in an alternative, fantastical world. Sometimes you immediately know that an idea will carry a story, even while it is still in the rough. The tree would bear a fruit, which would reveal a secret truth to anybody who ate it.

I imagined a tree that could be fed by whispering a lie to it, then getting as many people as possible to believe the lie. I honestly can’t remember the train of thought that led up to this, but I remember stopping on the bridge and knowing that I had the heart of a story. I first came up with the central idea for The Lie Tree while I was walking over Richmond Lock. Please give a warm welcome to Frances Hardinge! Today we are delighted to welcome Frances Hardinge – one of Ana’s favourite authors of all time – to the blog, to talk about The Lie Tree.

In this feature, we invite writers to talk about their new books, older titles, and their writing overall. “Inspirations and Influences” is a series of articles in which we invite authors to write guest posts talking about their Inspirations and Influences. In which Frances Hardinge talks The Lie Tree, one of Ana’s favourite books of 2015.

The lie tree