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The international bestseller from a prize-winning poet and critic

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My father comes into focus for me on a Liars´ Club afternoon. He sits at a wobbly card table weighed down by a bottle. Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can´t but write it in the present tense.

Mary Karr grew up in a swampy East Texas refinery town in a volatile and defiantly loving family. In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing better than to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars´ Club.

When it was published in 1995, The Liars´ Club raised the art of memoir to a new level and brought about a dramatic revival of the form. It is a classic that paints a harsh world redeemed by Karr´s warmth, intelligent humour and finely spun prose; The Liars´ Club is both heart-stopping and heart-felt.

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Harrowing but funny . . . A father prone to brawls; a heavy-drinking mother who teetered on the verge of self-destruction; a grandmother who carried a hacksaw in her handbag. But through it all shines humour, warmth and genuine love. Sunday Times

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Karr, Mary
Mary Karr is an acclaimed poet. Her memoir, The Liars´ Club , won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

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