The Lie Tree

The Lie Tree is a children’s fantasy novel published by Frances Hardinge in 2015. Set in the patriarchal, scientific society of the Victorian era in Great Britain, it follows Faith Sunderly, a teenager whose father dies of unknown causes when the Sunderly family relocates from Kent to the remote island of Vane. She tries to find out what happened to her father and to learn more about the natural sciences for which he had a passion; soon, she learns that the reason for her family’s abrupt move was to escape a mounting scandal about his scientific findings. Along the way, Sunderly finds a magical tree that consumes people’s whispered lies, converting them into truths, and resolves to save her family’s reputation and fortune.

The book begins on a damp and bleak journey through the English Channel by boat to the island of Vane. Faith Sunderly, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, is reluctantly traveling with her parents to Vane, ostensibly to allow her father, the Reverend Erasmus, to help out with an archaeological site. In their 1860s world, the scientific community is still coming to terms with the theory of evolution, trying in different ways to fit it in with its adamant Creationist religious beliefs. Erasmus has recently landed a place in the spotlight for his discovery of the fossil of a winged man.

After her family settles into their new home on the island, Faith’s own scientific curiosity leads her to believe things may not be as they seem with their father. Rather than moving solely to explore a dig site, the family has moved to evade questions about the authenticity of his fossil. Suddenly, her father is discovered dead, and Faith’s mother and uncle rush to prevent public accusations of suicide from getting to the media. Meanwhile, Faith believes he has been murdered and resolves to find out why.



Faith first traces her father’s footsteps to his most recent discovery. The specimen is a strange tree whose fruit is supposed to induce visions in the people who consume it. Even stranger, the tree only flowers and bears fruit if it is fed whispered lies, which the whisperer must then spread to other people. Resolute in the fact of her father’s murder, Faith creates a lie that his ghost is haunting the island because it is angry with the village residents who keep appealing to the coroner to ascertain whether he committed suicide. In place of suicide, Faith plants the suggestion that the archaeological site is actually the site of buried treasure from a past smuggler, and that someone else wanted to get at it first. As Faith nurtures these fictions, they propagate throughout the whole island, causing turmoil and violence among its people as she balks at their irrational interactions.

The Lie Tree soon becomes a tool for Faith to express her most malicious impulses. Yet, her usage of the tree is presented as human given her background: she is resentful of having spent her fourteen years alive treated as incompetent, weak, and stupid whenever she tried to speak intelligently, relegated into the sexist gender expectations for young girls to be meek and quiet. For example, Faith terrorizes a young servant girl who was the first to suggest that Erasmus committed suicide. She also blackmails a village boy into assisting with the murder mystery. Then, in one of her worst rumors, she convinces the islanders to hurt Miss Hunter, who is in charge of the post office. The morality of Faith’s actions is ambiguous: she is causing harm to her community, but in doing so, is enabled to see and understand more about the world. She meets people she would normally never be allowed to talk to, gaining exposure to the darker parts of her seemingly polite world. As a result, she is able to mold her conception of self into a more ideal form less hindered by the oppressive gender norms of her world. This freedom for self-determination also hones her ability to recognize and call out the oppression of others: for example, her left-handed brother is forced to keep his dominant arm in a sling out of a religious belief that the right hand should be dominant.

Faith ultimately finds that the perpetrator of the murder was Agatha, a brilliant scientist and naturalist who found it impossible to succeed in her place and time despite her brilliant mind. Ironically, Faith sympathizes with her father’s murderer, having felt the same misogyny and oppression throughout her young life. But, while Faith’s ultimate goal, given her condition, is to better understand and gain tools for dealing with a confusing external world, Agatha’s downfall is in her decision to get rich by committing murder and stealing the Lie Tree from Erasmus. Afterward, she contracts malaria and falls into deep alcoholism. By the end of the novel, she has committed suicide, giving Faith’s vengeful murder investigation an ambivalent closure that triggers her own empathy.



Agatha’s act constitutes in part a foreshadowing of who Faith might be if she continues on a path of malice and resentment. Avoiding that path, Faith reconciles with her mother and brother, learning to internalize the values of the family in order to furnish an identity and gain some semblance of freedom and self-determination. Thus, Hardinge’s novel suggests that a subject’s salvation from the oppressive conditions of any society throughout time is not in the impossible act of erasing or avenging an unfair past, but rather in accepting it and learning to optimize one’s life according to what is afforded.