The Distance Between Lies

In June 2004, five Cambridge undergraduates walked down to the mill pool below Grantchester after the May Ball. Four came back. Frances Vane drowned, and her friends agreed a story about how. Twenty-two years later, in Oxford, a postgraduate student who had started asking about that night is found dead in the Cherwell. Eleanor 'Nell' Aldous, sound restorer, was one of the five. She has spent two decades unable to remember the night properly, and she is about to find out why. Because the four survivors did not simply lie in 2004. They were recruited into a memory study, and rehearsal, suggestion and repetition hardened their agreed account until it became a memory none of them can now tell from the truth. The lies cannot be caught out by contradiction, because they no longer contradict. A literary psychological thriller set between Oxford, Cambridge and the Kent coast, The Distance Between Lies is a novel about the space between the account and what happened, and about a woman who has to decide how much of her own two minutes she is prepared to give up.