The judges for the Children's Book Award 'loved dark, sprawling, fiercely clever novel', stating it would 'grip readers of all ages', while the chair of the judges for the Book of the Year award described the book as a 'real page turner', suitable for adults as much as for children. In the 2015 Costa Book Awards, The Lie Tree won both in the Children's Book Award category and the overall Book of the Year, an achievement only previously managed by Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass in 2001. Frances Hardinge is the winner of the Costa Book of the Year for The Lie Tree, one of just two young adult novels to win the major UK literary prize. The Sunday Times named the book its children's book of the year for 2015. The Guardian praised The Lie Tree's 'convincing picture of the times' and Hardinge's 'trademark wit and intelligence', calling the book 'at once entertaining and provocative'. The lies and rumors that Faith starts grow rapidly and events soon become out of control. In her efforts to discover what happened to her father, and to follow his footsteps of studying natural science, she discovers a tree that provides truths by feeding on whispered lies. The Lie Tree is set in the male-dominated Victorian scientific society, and tells the story of Faith Sunderly, a 14-year-old girl whose father is killed under mysterious circumstances after the family moves to a small island to get away from London. To most people, she is reliable, dull, trustworthy - a proper young lady who knows her place as inferior to men.

The book won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year. A deliciously creepy novel from Frances Hardinge, the award-winning author of Cuckoo Song and Fly By Night, and winner of the Costa Best Book of the Year prize. The Lie Tree is the seventh children's fantasy novel by Frances Hardinge, published in 2015 by Macmillan Publishers.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge