Truth is the topic, and narrator, in New York Times bestselling writer Mitch Albom‘s powerful new novel, The Little Liar. He turns for the first time to one of the darkest chapters in human history—the Holocaust.
A fable-like adventure that travels from Greece under Nazi occupation to America after the war, it intertwines the lives of three children who were victims of the war’s deceptions as they confront both revenge and devotion, and ultimately seek the grace of redemption. This singular and timeless story finds the power of love amidst the darkest of realities.
Albom is a magical storyteller who imbues hope into universal tales of our human imperfections and eternal search for meaning. His books transcend borders and cultural boundaries, selling more than 40 million copies worldwide in forty-eight languages. His classic Tuesdays with Morrie is the bestselling memoir of all time which topped the list for four straight years and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2022.
We talked with Albom about what prompted this topic, family and practical research, the timeliness of the theme and of course, what he’s up to next.
Interviewed for Family Entourage
Family Entourage: Thanks so much for taking the time today. I’m thrilled to talk to you. I’ve read a number of your books. I’m very excited for your latest one, The Little Liar. So talk to me, what prompted you to write about truth?
Mitch Albom: Well, I am a little different than some other writers in that I try to pick a theme that I’m going to write about before I decide on the plot. So like the Five People You Meet in Heaven, I wanted to write about people who felt that they didn’t matter. And For One More Day, I wanted to write about what people would do if they were given an extra day with someone who they lost. And then I sort of construct a story. So I’ve always been interested in truth and lying and the consequences of when we lie. And so I was looking for a story that I thought could really bring that point home. And I decided to set it during a period of time when truth was at its most precarious position, that being World War II, particularly during the Holocaust in Europe. And I came up with this story that I thought, yeah, this’ll work. This will make the point. And then really the coup de grâce on it was I decided to make the narrator Truth. The book begins by saying, you can trust the story you’re about to hear because I’m the only thing you can trust. I’m truth. This is a story about a boy who tried to break me. The whole story is just told in the Voice of Truth. And once I had that narrator, I knew I had something that at least I thought was special.
FE: I think it was such a unique way to share the story. And one of those things, truth and lies kind of dealing with the deception and then that leads to forgiveness. Can that happen? Talk to me about those strong two poles of when you do something that you just know is wrong and can you redeem yourself for it?
MA: Yeah. Well, you hit on it really, if I had to sum up the book in an esoteric sentence, it would be what’s the biggest lie you ever told? And what would you do to be forgiven for that lie? And anyone who reads it can find that relationship to themselves. In my case, in the story that I created, it’s a little boy who’s 11 years old and has never told a lie in his life. And a little girl who has a crush on him and loves him because of his honesty. And when the Nazis invade their town in Greece, they find out about his honest reputation and they decide to use him as a weapon. So they separate him from all the other people and they say, we’ll let you go back to your family very soon. All you have to do is a little favor for us.
Stand on these railroad tracks. Every day these trains are going to come. And people aren’t going to know what they’re going, where they’re going. You just tell them they’re going to good homes and good new jobs, and they’re going to all be together and they’ll be happy to hear it. And then after you’re done, you can go back to your family. So thinking that he’s telling the truth, he’s never told a lie before, why would he be any different now he does this day after day and the people trust him. And then on the very last day, he sees his family and this little girl being shoved inside a boxcar and he finds out that these trains are actually going to Auschwitz in the concentration camps and the book follows What happens to him from that moment for the next 40 years as the ramifications of that single lie, that one lie that he was tricked into saying on him, on the girl who loves him, on his family, and on the Nazi who tricked him all throughout the next 40 years as he seeks to be forgiven. And the girl who loves him tries to find him again, loses track of him, and he keeps changing his names and he becomes a pathological liar, and he’s impossible to find, but she wants to forgive him for what she knows wasn’t his fault. And it’s sort of this epic love story that comes together at the very end for a big kind of climactic finish.
RM: It’s so powerful because it’s one thing to hear something, it’s one thing to be told how things can play out, but when you’re invested in a story, it has a lot more application, I feel like, to your own life, and you’re able to intangibly see the ways that things can play out. I know that you write historical fiction, you put a lot of research and time into that. So what did that look like surrounding this?
MA: Well, in this particular case, I mean, it was research of my whole life. I grew up with Jewish people in my neighborhood who wore long sleeves, even in the hot summertime. And I would ask my mother, why are they wearing long sleeves? She’d say, well, they have numbers tattooed on their arms and they don’t want people to see. And I had to learn about what that was about, all the way up to the actual research for this book, which didn’t just consist of going to Greece and learning about the culture and learning what happened there. Which many people, by the way, don’t even know that the Holocaust hit Greece. And I wanted to set it in a place that hadn’t been told very often before. Most Holocaust related books are in Poland or Germany or whatever. I wanted to do something that felt totally different and surprise people.
And of course, I talked to a lot of people who were survivors. Thank God there’s still a few of them left. Unfortunately, there’s not going to be a whole lot left for long. And that’s why I think stories like the Little liar and books like these are important because they may go on even after the survivors aren’t here to tell their story, to tell the account of what happened, but not just the horrors because it’s not a Holocaust book. Like, okay, let’s start on the first day of the concentration camp and let’s end on liberation. And in between it’s just horror, horror, horror, horror. I don’t know how to write a book like that. That would be a hopeless book. And I write from hope. That’s a big part of it. I write about the ramifications of what happened on the people both before the war, during the war when they couldn’t believe this stuff was happening, and after the war when they tried to put their lives back together.
FE: Well, it is so interesting because it’s not lost on me that we are currently, the current climate of the world is continuing to deal with racial injustice is real, is the center of it. Talk to me a little bit about how poignant it is that the book’s released now.
MA: Well, I can’t take any credit for that. I started writing it two years ago, and I just thought it was an interesting theme that I wanted to explore. But it sure did come out at a time when suddenly a lot of it is very, very relevant. And the antisemitism, forget about your take on Israel, Gaza or all that for a moment, just the pure hatred that is emerging towards Jews and the blocking them from going into classrooms, chasing them down the halls and forcing them to hide. This is very reminiscent of the time that I write about where at the beginning it was just, oh, some people have it out for them, some people don’t like them. Some people say some bad things about ’em, and next thing it moved to something else. And then it was protest and it was blocking, and then it was the rights were taken away and then their homes were taken away, their businesses were taken away, and their lives were ultimately taken away. So it certainly will make Jewish people nervous to see things that go on in the world now that are very echoing of the stuff that went on then. And so it turns out that the little liar becomes almost a cautionary tale about what happens when we allow lies to kind of take over and hate to sort of take over from the truth and from love.
FE: I’m curious, do you already have the next topic or virtue that you want to tackle…
MA: I do. Yeah, I do. I normally don’t. I normally don’t. People say, what do you do when you finish a book? I say, I collapse. I go face down and I don’t do anything for five, six months. And then just, it’s like an athlete getting his body back after a tough season, it sort of starts to come back. You feel rested, you decide, okay, I think I’m ready to start another one, and you start another one. But in this case, I’ve had something in the back of my mind for a while, and this book took a lot out of me. It was a lot. It’s very emotional. I think it’s the best novel I’ve ever written. It’s an interweaving of four stories that go back and forth. There’s a lot of heartache, but there’s a lot of hope and there’s a lot of inspiration and love at the end and a lot of forgiveness. And I just wanted to write something that was a little lighter the next time around. So I have that set, and I’ll be starting on that in a couple of weeks actually.
FE: I love that. No, I know that sometimes you develop your characters independently from each other and then weave them together. Was that the case with these three leads?
MA: No, in this case, it’s a story about two brothers, a girl who kind of the older brother loves, but she loves the younger brother. And I had a relationship with my younger brother where he got away with everything and I didn’t and had that kind of older brother’s syndrome. And so I knew how to kind of create that because during the course of the book, Nico is the little boy. His older brother, Sebastian, ends up being sent to the concentration camps and blames his brother and says, if I ever survive this, I’m going to find him and take revenge on him. Meanwhile, the girl, Fannie, who loves him, knows that it wasn’t his fault. And she says, if I ever survived this, I’m going to find him and forgive him. So you have her searching for him to forgive him, his brother searching for him to take revenge on him, and him hiding and becoming this reclusive figure.
Because what happens to him is that he loses the ability to speak the truth. That’s the consequence. I said before, what are the consequences of this lie? The consequences for him is it won’t come out of his mouth anymore. So even when he goes to talk about breakfast, he lies. When he talks about a car that he drives, he lies. He ends up changing his name tens of times over on different passports, different nationalities. He ends up in America and as often happens with brazen liars in America, he becomes immensely successful and a millionaire. And he’s got all this money, but he’s a reclusive guy and he doesn’t let anybody see him, or he is just hiding to be because living with the guilt of what he did, and Fannie the girl tries to track him down. So it’s also a very epic love story. I think it’s the best love story I’ve written because it spans 40 years that they don’t see one another and are still affected by one another until the end when they kind of come back together. So it’s got a lot of elements in it, but I did not develop them independently. They were all kind of in a loop.
FE: Nice. Well, the little wire cannot wait for people to get their hands on it, and I thank you so much for delivering it to us at a time like this.
Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar is available now
